GAINESVILLE- 

 The Alachua County primary election is less than two weeks away, but early voting starts this Saturday.
 

Over 150,000 residents will be hitting the polls to vote in this year's primary election, but before any voting begins all this equipment needs to be tested.
 

"We bring up ballots that may be cast on that machine and cast votes for each of the candidates, making sure that the machine records them correctly. That where we touched on the screen does match with where that selection lights up and that the results that it records match what we touched," said Will Boyett.
 

Boyett works at the Alachua County Elections Office. He said they test this touchscreen equipment, the optical scan equipment which is used for the paper ballots and the hi-speed scanners used for absentee ballots.

"It has determined that all of these are valid votes and it believes all of these are blank or over voted ballots," said Boyett.

During the testing, members of the Canvassing Board verify every machine works properly.
 

"We pre-mark ballots for our test deck and we run those through the equipment so that we already know what the outcome of our test deck is and we can see if we get the same results on the machine," said Alachua County Supervisor of Elections Pam Carpenter.

Once everything has been evaluated all the voting equipment is sealed and put away.

"We set them into election mode so that from this point forward only live ballots can be cast. So that we can insure that only votes are cast at the polling sites and that no one tampers with it outside of election time," said Boyett.

As a way to make sure your vote is counted correctly.

 Testing was open to the public today. The next time election officials  will test the equipment is before the general election in November.