Snohomish County Elections on Tuesday, Oct. 18 will conduct the official logic and accuracy test on its ballot counting system for the Nov. 8 General Election. The test will be at 2 p.m. at the Snohomish County Auditor’s office on the first floor of the Admin West Building, 3000 Rockefeller Ave., Everett. The test is open to the public, including representatives of political parties, candidates and campaigns.

Ballot counting equipment and programming testing occurs before each election. Logic and accuracy test requirements are outlined in state law and ensure that the ballot counting system is correctly counting votes. The logic and accuracy test is witnessed by staff from the Washington State Secretary of State’s Office for federal and state elections.

The logic and accuracy test involves scanning and counting a group of marked test ballots with a known set of results. The group of test ballots, called the test deck, includes valid votes for each candidate and measure response as well as improperly marked ballots to ensure the system correctly identifies and handles each situation. After the test deck has been processed through the ballot-counting equipment, the ballot-counting system results are compared to the expected result for the test deck to ensure that the results match.

Accessible voting equipment will be pretested at 10 a.m. Oct. 18.  This test is also open to the public.

You can learn more about Snohomish County election observer opportunities here.