county

Will County Clerk Lauren Staley Ferry earlier this week accepted the first major piece of equipment to automate the Vote By Mail program in Will County. The high-speed, state-of-the-art EvoluJet Printer from BlueCrest has the capability of printing 2,200 ballots per hour. Specialists from BlueCrest and the manufacturer, Kyocera, were on hand to assemble the EvoluJet’s components and make the necessary adjustments to begin printing test ballots on location at the Will County Clerk’s Office. The EvoluJet Printer will be joined by two other major pieces of equipment: The high-speed Relia-Vote MSE Inserter will automate the assembly of Vote By Mail packets, and the Relia-Vote Vantage Sorter will streamline the sorting of Vote By Mail packets for outbound mailing and for organizing return ballots. These three machines will improve efficiency and accuracy across the entire Vote By Mail program. They also will save Will County taxpayers hundreds of thousands of dollars each election compared to the cost of assembling and processing Vote By Mail Ballots manually. Staley Ferry announced back in August that the Will County Board had unanimously approved $1.9 million in funding to purchase equipment to automate her office’s growing Vote By Mail program.