Hello touchscreens, good bye vote tally sheets. The public will get its first glimpse of the $3.5 million effort that began in 2017 to modernize the operations of the Chicago City Council at Wednesday’s meeting.
The debut of the new voting system is a high-profile test for City Clerk Anna Valencia, who is running for the Democratic nomination in the race to replace retiring Secretary of State Jesse White. She faces former state Treasurer Alexi Giannoulias and Ald. David Moore in the June contest.
That system has undergone two months of testing and several dry runs with alderpeople to ensure all goes smoothly on Wednesday. But Valencia acknowledged last-minute problems could pop up, as they did on Monday while WTTW News observed the system.Valencia acknowledged the success — or failure — of the new system rests in the hands of the alderpeople, some of whom still struggle to mute themselves during virtual meetings a full 24 months into the COVID-19 pandemic.
The vote tally will refresh every 10 seconds, giving members of the public and the news media a bird’s eye view of the process. Every other roll call vote in Chicago City Council history has been conducted by voice, with the clerk or their representative calling out each alderperson’s name and waiting for each person to audibly and intelligibly respond yay or nay.
Lawanda Crayton, the chief technology officer for the city clerk's office, displays the voting screen members of the Chicago City Council will see as part of the new electronic voting system on Monday, March 21, 2022.
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