Volusia & Flagler Get Nearly $500K For Election Security

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Daytona Beach, FL - With the primaries almost a month away and the registration deadline coming next week, both Volusia and Flagler County receive state money to beef up election security.

State legislators accepted $19.2 million from the federal government recently with the mission of enhancing security for the upcoming elections.

The money is allotted per number of eligible voters. The minimum allotted per county is $50,000, while bigger counties like Miami-Dade receive $1.6 million and Broward receiving $1.1 million. Any money left over will be returned to the state per the conditions of the federal allocation.

According to Volusia County Election Supervisor Lisa Lewis, Volusia County will be receiving $378,123.53 from the state. Their election wishlist included upgrading the vote tabulators from 3G to 4G, and new security cameras. Lewis says the cameras are especially important when ballots are on the floor and when the vote-by-mail ballots are being processed.

Also on the Volusia County wishlist is enhancing the IT department.

"We fall under the county's IT, so they have a cybersecurity area here," Lewis said. "We're going to enhance some servers there and do training, especially with employees."

Flagler County received $112,678.04 from the state and their wishlist is similar to Volusia's.

Kaiti Lenhart, the Flagler County Elections Supervisor, says part of their share will be to upgrade the electronic poll books.

Lenhart also went to say that, to her knowledge, there were no issues with voting in the county. However, she did say there was a possible virus attached to an email sent to several supervisors around the state, but none were received in Flagler.

The number of voters in Flagler is also setting a record.

"I believe that our county is growing again," says Lenhart after the new current total of voters in Flagler was revealed to be over 81,000.

She attributes the increase to more people moving into the county and said there also seems to be an influx of voters who are registering for the first time.

The primary election is August 28th and the deadline to register is July 30th.