The county commissioners at their Wednesday meeting defended the ES&S voting machines decried as hackable and nefarious by the proponents of a forensic audit of the 2020 election who have attended the last several meetings.

Fred Hensel, who asked to appear on the meeting agenda to request that electronic voting machines be removed in all future elections, told the commissioners that former President Donald Trump should have won the 2020 election because 9,900 new Republican voters versus 1,300 new Democratic voters registered for the election, yet Trump won the county by the same margin he did in 2016.

Hensel also said hacking can happen in many industries, suggesting the ES&S machines were compromised during the 2020 general election.

“The only way to eliminate the chance of hacking is to eliminate the machines,” Hensel said.

Commissioner Leslie Osche asked Aaron Sheasley, director of the county bureau of elections, if there is a modem in the vote scanners used in the precincts.

He replied there is not and proceeded to explain that each precinct’s judges of elections open the packs of shrink-wrapped ballots in the morning on election day.

The ballots include a stub with a perforation, Sheasley said.

After a voter signs the pollbook, he or she is handed a ballot that has been torn at the perforation, and the voter uses a pencil to fill in the circle on the paper ballot beside the candidates they choose.

The voter then walks to a scanner that is monitored by a pollworker who does not touch the ballot.

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