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The Allegheny County Elections Division today announced it has verified the firmware on a random sample of 18 voting machines. The testing was conducted at the County’s elections warehouse on Saturday and today under the supervision of County Election officials following protocols developed in conjunction with the Pennsylvania Department of State.

“Software verification is another step in our continuing effort to be on the forefront of ensuring accurate and secure elections,” said Elections Manager Mark Wolosik. “Voters can go to the polls on Nov. 4 with confidence that elections in Allegheny County continue to be secure and accurate and that their votes count.”

The testing was conducted by SysTest Labs, a Colorado-based professional consulting organization that provides independent verification and validation, software test engineering, quality assurance, and compliance testing services. SysTest Labs found that the firmware version residing on the 18 randomly chosen machines is an exact, true and unaltered version of the federally certified, trusted build held in archive at SysTest Labs and in escrow by the Secretary of the Commonwealth.

According to SysTest Labs, Allegheny County is the first jurisdiction in the United States to perform such an in-depth verification of the ES&S iVotronic firmware.

Since Allegheny County began using electronic voting machines in May 2006, it has electronically verified the operating system on all 4,700 voting machines prior to each primary and general election. In addition, each voting machine has undergone an automatic mock election to ensure it records and tallies votes correctly prior to each primary and general election. Every ballot variation, which can number several hundred, has also been manually voted and tallied to guarantee accuracy prior to each primary and general election.

On every primary and general election day, a certified public accounting firm has randomly selected multiple machines and conducted a parallel test by voting a script of its design and comparing the actual results to those expected by the script.

Elections division staff will provide a full briefing to the Allegheny County Board of Elections at its meeting at 10:00 a.m. tomorrow, Oct. 21, in Conference Room 1 on the first floor of the Allegheny County Courthouse.