Voting machines at the Dallas County Courthouse went through final testing before opening for business Tuesday morning.

ES&S director of print services Mark Kelley and voting machine custodian Rhuben Ellis gave each machine a test-run to make sure they were in service Election Day.

The first step of testing, Kelley said, begins in Birmingham at the home office.

“We test them up there and go through simple things like did we spell the names correctly and do we have the right precincts,” he said. “That’s the electronic aspect.”

Kelley said the information is then passed to the county hosting the election with some test votes through a computer to crosscheck all the information.

Machines are then tested with the black information box inside.

“Then you are looking at if the machine is seeing what it’s supposed to, rejecting blanks and accepting votes,” he said. “That’s when we marry the initial check with the hardware itself.”

The final step, he said, is to make sure there are zero votes left in the machine.

Dallas County, he said, uses the Optical Scanner, along with 51 other Alabama counties.

Public testing is advertised, Kelley said, but rarely draws anyone aside from the occasional candidate or probate judge.