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ST. CLAIRSVILLE -- Fulfilling mandates on cyber security led the discussion during Tuesday's meeting of the Belmont County Board of Elections.
Director William Shubat also discussed a recent cyber security workshop attended by members of multiple election boards.
The election board is also required to participate in federal and state programs related to cyber security. Those include free weekly scans of of the board's IP addresses by the Elections Infrastructure Information Sharing and Analysis Center.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security will provide $30,000 in grant funding to hire an entity to create an election infrastructure security assessment plan. The plan must be completed and turned over to the Ohio Secretary of State by Oct. 15. The board is in the beginning stages of gathering information.
The board has until July 30 to decide on an entity from a list of technical colleges that have been approved do the work. The board will contact the closest college, Eastern Gateway Community College, to make inquiries. It will also contact Jefferson County's board of elections.
Board members said they were confident in their system and practices.
"Nothing to do with our election tabulation is hooked up to the internet," said Deputy Director Kelly McCabe.
"We're not hooked into anything," said Shubat. "We don't get online to do anything on our computer system."
"We've not had any issues," Michael Shaheen said. "We plan to be compliant. It never hurts to be safe."
Also, the board is dissatisfied with the electronic pollbooks that it has used for the last two elections and will return them.
"We've had some difficulties and we are going to not use them in November," said Chairwoman Frankie Lee Carnes.
"We did our due diligence before we picked these," Shaheen said. "We thought these were state-of-the-art. There were some complications.
"They were (information technology) issues, not operator issues," he said.
The board had intended to use state funding of about $87,000 to purchase the pollbooks, but because it had not expended funds until it knew the devices worked, the money should be available to purchase other pollbooks.
Board memebrs also will purchase accessible ballot marking software to assist people with disabilities, such as blindness, vote. It will be in place by Sept. 1. Pricing will be determined by the number of ballots requested. The board will use state grant funding of $16,000.
"They have to fill out a special absentee application to request it," Carnes said.
McCabe said the new software would supplant the current method, where the ballot on the board's website would be read out to blind individuals.
"Now we won't have that anymore, it will have this instead," she said." "You'll be able to mark it at home."
In other business, the county's Democratic and Republican parties will be notified they have until Aug. 13 to nominate candidates to complete the juvenile probate court judge's unexpired term ending Feb. 8, 2021. The candidates will run in the November election. The prior judge had stepped down for health reasons.
Belmont County also will host the regional meeting for the Southeastern region of the boards of elections from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. Aug. 22. The topic will be campaign finance training. County boards of elections interested in attending must RSVP by the first week of August. The topic will be campaign finances.
The next meeting will be held at 4 p.m. Aug. 20.