SANTA FE COUNTY, N.M. (KRQE) – When people go to cast their votes in Santa Fe County this year, there will be extra measures in place to bolster election security. While the new additions might not be visible to voters, the Santa Fe County Clerk's Office said they will be keeping close watch to ensure the voting process goes on without issues. To do so, Santa Fe County Clerk Katherine Clark, a Democrat who is running in the 2024 election unopposed, launched a first-of-a-kind pilot program designed to protect election tabulators and ballots. Story continues below Trending: Woman accused of driving drunk and hitting Albuquerque firefighter with vehicle Podcast: Meteorologists Tackle Weather Misinformation News: Another locally-owned supermarket coming to International District Community: ‘He protected her’: New Mexico dog burned while shielding other dog in fire "So when ballots are traveling between the sites, either from the pickup at the end of the early voting day or when they're coming back to the office to bring back their ballots at the end of election day, we actually GPS track all of those ballot boxes," Clark explained. Before implementing Project Bruno, Clark said ballots were left in tabulators overnight, "we felt that that was a risk management issue," she said. Now, the county moves the ballots to a secure location to serve as a backup in case anything happens to the tabulators. "We actually have a paper copy stored separately from the data chip, so that way if anything were to happen we can always recover that vote," Clark added. To make sure that tabulators are not tampered with, officials have also installed GPS trackers and an accelerometer, which measures the acceleration of an object, to determine if the tabulator was jostled overnight. "We also, as part of that initiative, that pilot program, added a universal power supply to that tabulator so that we can extend its battery life should the power go out, and we also have actually added a little detector where the tabulator plugs into the wall that sends us a text message telling us if that circuit has been broken," Clark said. Other backup power supplies the county has includes a Ford F-150 Lightning truck that can be used to charge a polling site and traditional generators All of these new measures that are part of Project Bruno earned the Santa Fe County Clerk's Office the 2024 Guardian Award at the 39th Annual National Election Center Conference in Detroit, Michigan. Clark said other election officials in the state and across the country have expressed interest in implementing similar measures during elections. "We're really, really interested in that idea that we are the example for everyone else in terms of election excellence," Clark said, also noting that New Mexico is currently ranked number one in election administration by the MIT Election Performance Index.