Lauderdale County Poll officials are prepping for the upcoming election.

With the General Election deadline approaching poll officials are testing and prepping the voting machines to knock out any kinks.

“So far everything has been going smooth, the first time to use these machines were back in June, and we had a very smooth voting process there really were not a lot of hiccups, I didn’t hear any complaints. I hear nothing but positive things about a paper trail being brought back to the voting process, and so we’re happy about that.”

Tate says there is a long process when any election day is approaching, and the biggest concern is moving voting machines out of storage.

“We have box trucks where these machines will stay good and dry, and we have 40 different precincts, there is a scanner to each precinct. We’ll be taking those out starting today, and that’ll continue up until Monday, and we’ll go to each precinct with their scanner, and we’ll set the machines to the side.”

Tate adds that there is not much to be alarmed about when using these voting machines because of the durability.

“All of these machines come with a manual ballot entry. In other words, these machines can lose power their back up battery can last for about four hours, and if the lights are still out after 4 hours there is a compartment to go old school if you will; where you get those ballots. You put them into another tray, that tray will be locked, and then they will be fed into a machine later.”