COEUR d'ALENE — Community members and county officials Monday morning gathered in the counting room of the Kootenai County Elections Office to witness the logic and accuracy test for today’s school levy elections.

In attendance were Kootenai County Treasurer Steve Matheson and Commissioner Chris Fillios, who oversaw the process and checked detail reports that came from the three DS850 ballot counting machines.

"With as much concern as there’s been about the accuracy and integrity of elections, I think it’s imperative that we do this," Fillios said.

The testing was conducted by elections manager Asa Gray. With mechanical whirs and slaps of paper, the machines sorted ballots into the top and bottom bins. The ones that land in the top stand out as needing another look, Gray explained.

"It could be there is an unclear mark that we need to look at and see if someone made a hesitation mark and then filled in a different bubble,” he said.

Every ballot that goes in the ballot box is counted as a ballot cast, no matter how the voter marked it or didn’t mark it, Gray said.

"However, that doesn’t mean if there’s multiple things on the ballot that the voter voted every question or every office on the ballot," he said. "Some of them will have blanks, some of them will have an overvote. We want to make sure the ballot cast represents how many ballots cast, but that won’t necessarily represent the equal number of 'yes' or 'no' votes."

Two people are assigned to each machine on election night. The room is under camera surveillance and protected by a keypad lock. Votes are not counted at each precinct, but delivered to the elections office for tabulation.

The machines easily run 200 or 250 ballots per minute without jamming, but they can run up to 300 per minute.

"We do not push them that hard," Kootenai County Clerk Jim Brannon said. "It’s like driving the Mercedes at 100 — it’s a lot happier at 80."

Coeur d'Alene resident Josette Shults decided to attend the logic and accuracy testing after reading Sunday’s Press article providing levy information and details of the testing process being open to the public.

"There’s a bunch of us who are just trying to get more politically involved in a constructive way, and the first part of that is educating yourself," Shults said. "Election integrity is also very important to me, so this is the first step in seeing what the process actually is."

She said she’s not going to vote "no" if the state is doing its job funding education, but “the more funding we do have locally, the more control we have locally, and that’s a good thing. I’m just trying to balance that all out."

"I don’t want to vote ‘no,’ because education is important, but I have a lot of concerns about Kootenai County and the growth we’re experiencing, and the potential of property values going up, so tax is going up," Shults said. "It’s something that really needs to be sorted out. I don't want to see the long-term residents penalized because of the new people moving in. They’re inflating property values, so something has to be done to adjust tax rates down."

As of the time of the accuracy testing, Brannon reported that 4,953 absentee ballots had been sent to voters, and 3,521 had been received. During the two weeks of early voting, 918 votes were submitted. During the 2019 school levies, 2,088 absentee ballots were sent out. Of those, 1,877 were received and 631 early votes were counted.

"I do believe that our ability to check and double check as we did today between two elected officials should assure the public that we’re going to have fair and honest elections," Fillios said.

The polls are open 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. today for school levies in Coeur d'Alene, Post Falls, Lakeland and Kootenai school districts.