LISBON — The Columbiana County Board of Elections has approved the purchase of a new ballot scanner at a cost of $172,265 charged toward the voting equipment allocation through the state. “This is something that’s going to be paid by state contracting price,” director Kim Fusco said. “It’s no cost to the county.”

At the board’s regular March meeting Wednesday, deputy director Bryce Miner said funding for the scanner came out of last year’s state allocation toward new voting equipment. “For Columbiana County we just had north of $1 million to use on new voting equipment last year,” Miner said. “We spent $845,000 of that. This purchase will be $172,265 which would take us almost to our state allocated funds.”

The new DS950 scanner won’t arrive in time for this year’s primary election, according to Miner who said it could arrive by November at the earliest. He said this 950 scanner was not available when the board purchased the 450 model last year. The county will use the new scanner primarily and have the 450 model on hand as a backup, Miner said. “Kim and I thought it would be a valuable use of the remainder of our state funds to have a backup here in case the main machine would go down on election night,” he said. “It is always good to have backups in an election,” he said.

The new scanner is much faster than the one the county currently has, Miner said, and it will be the most current model for the time being. “The 450 that we have now scans 72 ballots per minute and the 950 scans 280 ballots per minute,” he said. “They’re not developing, at least currently, any sort of other scanners so the DS950 is going to be their scanner moving forward for the foreseeable future.”

In other news, Fusco said the board had received a new directive Wednesday that meant some more funding for the county to the tune of $84,538. She said the money is to help the county with moving the Primary 2022 election forward, likely including having vendors come back to reprogram for the district and throughout the county.

Miner said last week the General Assembly allocated $9 million from the Secretary of State’s office to help 88 of the county boards of elections to administer the primary election and Columbiana county received $84,538. The funds can be used for administrative costs which can be for overtime costs, hiring or training of temporary staff, vendor expenses which could include ballot printing setup or election management setup, as well as any other additional pre approved purchases. “Kim and I will do our due diligence to make sure that we use this money wisely and we appreciate the General Assembly helping us out during these trying times,” Miner said.

The county will be required to submit a spreadsheet by Aug. 1 detailing everything it was spent on, and Fusco said any money that isn’t used must be returned.

Wednesday, the board also certified two candidate petitions in the race for state representative in the 79th district for Monica Robb Blasdel, a republican, and Taylor Eastham, a democrat. They also approved $88,841.69 in chargebacks from the 2021 November General Election. The next board meeting will be at 1:30 on Tues. April 12.