Montgomery County Certifies Election Results
by Jim Melwert
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- After a request for a recount from the Jill Stein campaign was shot down in Montgomery County court last week, the county officially certified their election results on Tuesday.
Montgomery County Elections Board Chairwoman Val Arkoosh addressed concerns that have been raised about the county's voting machines.
"I want to assure our voters that we take the integrity of our voting technology very seriously. We have had the security of all Montgomery county systems evaluated by outside security experts over the past year," she said.
The machines the county uses were bought in 1996, but county officials say they are still considered some of the most reliable.
And they once again stressed the security of the machines, though that will be part of the review.
Arkoosh says they'll also look at how absentee ballots were handled.
More than 2000 additional ballots came in under an extended deadline, after the county waited as long as legally possible to print them.
Arkoosh says, at the time, waiting seemed like the right move as there were challenges that could have meant changes to the ballot.
"Reprogramming more than 1,000 machines with language changes and reprinting tens of thousands of ballots would have been a huge and costly undertaking," she said.
But Arkoosh says the return rate was still lower than in years past.
