Tuesday was the day to validate vote- tabulating machines.
First they verify that the machine count starts at zero. Then they test the vote-count against a known result.
Everything has to be perfect.
Oregon's Jackson County Clerk is Christine Walker. She is a life-long Republican serving in what is now a non-partisan office. She had two public witnesses as she carried out the verification tests for the county's vote-tabulation machines. The law requires these tests prior to their use before every election. Robin Lee, a self-identified Republican and former candidate for a local school board, was there to observe. So was I. Machine tabulators have been a point of controversy nationally. Those systems faced accusations that they miscount or switch votes. Today's test was to make sure that doesn't happen. The whole machine-count system will be checked yet again right before the machine count that begins tomorrow and again twice more after the election. In addition, after the election some precincts will be drawn at random and they will be subject to a hand count.
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| Jackson County Clerk Christine Walker |
Election Department personnel operated the three tabulation machines that are side-by-side in the large election department counting room. The machines look like this, with ballots fed into the top tray. Then they are scanned and counted. Then they drop into the lower tray.
The procedure begins with demonstrating that the machines count zero when there are zero votes to count, i.e. that there are no phantom votes hidden in the vote counts. The ballot decks begin with a "header card," to prime the machine to count. The header card has the name of the tabulation vendor, Clear Ballot.
The ballots go through the counter quickly. The read-out display above the machine shows the count speed on this first trial run: 223 per minute.
After the demonstration of zero votes counted, the Election Department does multiple runs of ballot decks with votes marked in the oval at each ballot position, with known counts for each candidate. The goal is to make certain that each of the oval spots on the ballot, one for each candidate, gets recognized and counted. That means there are no blind spots or spots where votes get counted twice.
The county is required to have one verified tabulation machine. In fact, the county has three, which speeds up tabulation and provides redundancy and a backup. We saw the value of that on Tuesday because the demonstration was delayed briefly. Tabulator #3 had a problem for a few minutes. A cable--this blue one--apparently needed replacement. A cable? What could go wrong? The county's IT department diagnosed and fixed the problem promptly. Apparently there was wear at the point of connection. It was the same issue that emerged in one of Multnomah County's (i.e. Portland) machines in previous elections.
The procedure for counting votes is complicated by the fact that there will be multiple write-in candidates for party precinct committee people and for one of the county commissioner positions. Those ballots need to be reviewed and tabulated by hand. Another complication is the many irregular ballots, for example ballots with stray marks, cross-outs, or ovals marked with an "X" rather than filled in. Under Oregon law, a ballot does not need to be perfect for its votes to be counted. For example, if the voter used an "X", or if the voter wrote in a name but failed to fill in the adjacent oval, the vote will still count if voter intent is clear. Voters sometimes mark a ballot, and then change their minds, and the instructions tell people to mark out the incorrect vote and to fill in the bubble for the correct candidate. All of this requires some interpretation and judgement to determine voter intent.
Questionable ballots are examined by two-person boards at tables like these. Note there are two chairs at each table, one for people from two different political orientations, Republican, Democratic, or Non-Affiliated. This resolves most problem ballots. Professional staff is available and is called in if questions remain regarding a ballot.
Ballots, once counted and tabulated are stored for later review and audit in boxes marked for each precinct.
One strong impression one gets from seeing the election department is its size and separation of function. The operation takes place on the second floor of a building that was formerly a large Safeway grocery store. There is room to spread out. There are spaces for in-person voting, rooms for ballots to be scanned and logged when they come in, rooms for opening the ballots with a slit along the bottom of the envelope, rooms for resolving questions, rooms for storing ballots. This is not a messy-desk operation. Everything is in tubs, put away, numbered, and logged. These votes below have gone through the process but are awaiting the tabulation verification before they are counted.
26 comments:
Let’s hope elections officials aren’t naïve enough to think that doing their job, ensuring free and fair elections, will satisfy the public. We know from experience that when Republicans don’t get the results they want, they resort to violence. The workers deserve hazard pay.
What measures are in place to stop someone from voting multiple times?
What prevents someone from illegally voting in Oregon?
Thank you for the article. It was as thorough as it was reassuring.
It's good to see the details about the process.
I had one question for the SoS office that remains unanswered. I had posed a question of the SoS Facebook page regarding the postmarks on the outside envelope of ballots cast and returned to the election offices via USPS rather than dropped in one of the drop boxes.
A valid question as there are concerns of ballots being accepted and counted that were received after the official poll closing time.
The response I got was puzzling and remains unanswered. I simply asked how the USPS postmarks franked envelopes. The last I looked, the "free" postage for returning ballots is franked permit/business reply mail.
I'm curious:
- is a postmark present, as the USPS typically DOES NOT postmark this type of mail?
- what percentage of accepted ballots are received via drop boxes? via USPS?
- what percentage of ballots have issues that must be followed up?
---- require inspection by election worker?
---- require follow-up by the voter?
I'm a curious guy, and want to be sure every valid ballot is counted.
I was once notified by the election office years ago that I had won a local election, and was asked if I would accept the position. I w didn't even know I was running for office. I was elected by 3 write-in votes, apparently by one of the household of one of my neighbors who had asked what to do about local school committee positions. Evidently, no one was running in my precinct.
POSTMARKS. Yes, the USPS postmarks ballots, usually, but not always. I saw postmarked ballots and took a photo of one for a later blog. The election departmart also logs in ballots with a faint mark which photographs poorly, but it shows the date it was logged in. Under the law a ballot postmarked by election day is still counted if it arrives within 7 days of the election. Legally cast ballots, but with problems like a shaky signature, have a longer period--I forget the exact number but it is about 3 weeks--to cure that error. Again, to clarify: the ballot needs to have been legally cast within the election period, but if, for example, the voter needs to be contacted to sign again using better penmanship, or to clarify that the voter had hand surgery, or whatever, the clarification period goes well beyond election night. It isn't extending the election. It is extending the period to resolve a question.
I observed personally the potential problem. I helped a dear older friend, age 95, cast a vote. His intention was clear but his hand was unsteady in filling in an oval. He is a taxpayer and citizen and has every right to vote. But his ballot was not "perfect" in the sense that he made messy ovals.
Thanks, Peter, for the clear-eyed inside view of how our elections work. This is what should be on the tv news instead of showing graffiti threats and the kind of circus we saw in Arizona. I trust the county clerks to do their job, and as a former postal employee, I know the Postal Service applies similar care and diligence when handling the ballots that determine the future of our community and country.
This business of accepting ballots after election day is crazy. While it might work mechanically, it is a huge contributor to skepticism about election results.
I have always been an advocate of voting in person on election day. That’s a much more transparent process. There’s something to be said for quick and simple.
WHAT DTOPS PEOPLE FROM VOTING MULTIPLE TIMES?????
ANSWER Ballots have a distrinctive look as do ballot envelopes. Ballots are sent out to people and they are all identical except for a bar code printed on them. The bar code is attached to a single registered individual, whose identity is known at the time of registration, either on ones own or at the DMV where there is photo and address identity. So to vote a person would need to create a whole new identity, with address and face, and register multiple times. Then when the ballot is returned, in the bar-coded outer envelope, it is re-connected to a real person, with a nice paper trail if someone attempts to cheat. The point is that people don't just send in handwritten ballots. They are barcoded.
If a person attempts to vote someone else's ballot the signature verification will almost certainly trip them up. Households that vote the ballots of children in the family, people off at college, get caught that way. It is a felony. I wish people were sent to prison for five years, but most people in Oregon who get caught just get a slap on the wrist and a felony conviction on their record, which isn't enough, in my opinion.
My motorcycle accident in 1965 caused autonomic nerve damage, making it impossible to sign a ballot legibly. Nevertheless, I’ve never been asked to verify my signature. I wonder why not?
When I was a democrat, I was once the official JOCO election monitor. I discovered that the count could be illegally altered, most easily by the county clerk. The clerk had LOTS of blank ballots, for the possibility that there would be an unexpected rush on registering.
The problem was/is that all the regular ballots, filled in by voters days or weeks before “election night” were stored in a side room of the clerk's office. These what already been removed from the privacy envelopes, thus no way to know who filled them out. It would have been/would be, very easy for the clerk, or perhaps someone else in her office, to fill out some of the blank ballots in her possession, then swap them for an equal number of legitimate ballots in that side room.
The clerk claimed this would be impossible, since two keys were needed to open the door where the ballots were/are stored. Really? How many of these keys were floating around after all these years? And who says the clerk didn’t actually have copies of both keys?
My friend, Peter Sparcino, retired head of security at various large casinos in Nevada, was quite suspicious of this setup, so he spent a few nights parked in front of the JOCO courthouse, where he had a view of the ballot storage room's window.
One night, the lights went on in that room at around 2:00-3:00 a.m, and remained on for “a few” (I don’t remember the details, sorry).
Peter confronted the clerk about this, as it seemed to be exactly what we feared could happen. The clerk said, “I don’t know why you went to all the trouble; there was no ballot switching going on. Most likely it was simply the janitors cleaning the room.
Really? The JANITORS have access to all the ballots?
SOMETHING is wrong with this picture.
I could list other problems, but don’t want to spend all morning on this iPad. And, who knows? Maybe all the potential for fraud have been corrected by now? I sure hope so!
Oh, one issue that’s impossible to correct. That’s an alpha male (or female) forcing a whole family to sit down and vote together. So much for privacy in voting; so much for voting one's preference without undue influence.
One last thought. When we “checked” the electronic vote counting machine, it counted the half dozen check ballots we fed it successfully. But according to several sources, including “black box voting” they’ve had their computer geeks easily reprogram the machines' programs in such a way to give whatever candidate they prefer an extra number of votes, while subtracting an equal number of votes for the opponents.
Hand counting a few districts would likely uncover that fraud, but the ballot replacement method I described above? I’ve no idea how to prevent this, other than, perhaps video recording the ballot storage room with multiple video cameras. And I don’t know how hard it would be to alter video recordings.
Michael T, I’m with you. Paper ballots, back where we always used to vote-at or near our precincts. I also recommend the workers jointly count ALL ballots prior to taking them to the county clerks, and all sign the count to prove the count was done, and by whom.
Do you know why SOS Bill Bradbury and JOCO County Clerk Georgette Brown pushed so hard for vote by mail? I asked Georgette about it, while on a lower Rogue raft trip with her. She said, “well, Malcolm, vote by mail is forecast to save the counties 50 cents per vote!”
I told her that half a buck per vote to insure a more secure voting system seems like peanuts. But she stuck to her guns. So here we are.
Peter,
RE: POSTMARKS. Yes, the USPS postmarks ballots, usually, but not always. I saw postmarked ballots and took a photo of one for a later blog. The election departmart also logs in ballots with a faint mark which photographs poorly, but it shows the date it was logged in.
Thank you for this info. I wonder why the SoS is unable to simply ask the question and show the logging or postmark info. And why ballots are treated differently than other business reply/permit mail.
Seems like something rather simple to illustrate.
This is from the SoS FAQ on vote-by-mail. Seems to me that if there isn't a postmark, the ballot should not be counted. And business reply/permit franked mail is typically NOT postmarked.
What is the postmark rule / Can I mail my ballot on Election Day?
The postmark rule refers to a new law passed in 2021 that will allow ballots mailed* on Election Day to count even if they are received up to seven days after Election Day. So yes, you can mail your ballot on election day so long as it is picked up and postmarked by the post office that day.
This improvement ensures that every vote cast on time gets counted. It may also delay the results of close races because it will take a few days for all the votes to be counted.
*OAR 165-007-0045 requires ballots to “have a postal indicator” showing that the ballot was mailed on or before election day. Postal indicators, or postmarks, are applied to mail when they are processed at the post office.
https://www.amazon.com/Black-Box-Voting-Tampering-Century/dp/1890916900
Author Bev Harris is the 52-year old grandma who found 40,000 secret voting machine files on the Web, which have now been studied by computer scientists all over the world. "Black Box Voting" is the book that resulted from her investigations into the voting industry.
What she learned was that modern-day voting systems are run by private for-profit corporations, rely on a few cronies for oversight, using a certification system so fundamentally flawed that it allows machines to miscount and lose votes, with hidden back doors that enable "end runs" around the voting system. Find out why your vote might not count -- and what to do about it!
Bev Harris and her crew have been working on this issue ever since-I think- the Floriduh GW Bush voter fraud.
According to Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/lcwaN0002380/ “Summary
Black Box Voting, founded in 2003, is a nonpartisan investigative reporting and public education organization for elections”.
Still unconvinced? Read what Stanford University-home of the internet-has to say on the subject:
https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/cs201/projects/2006-07/electronic-voting/index_files/page0002.html
There is no evidence of significant voter fraud in U.S. elections, and there is no evidence that vote-by-mail results in any more fraud than going to the polls. Those who oppose it most, such as Trump and his cronies, use it themselves. It’s hard to beat the convenience of marking your ballot at home with the voters’ pamphlet beside you, taking breaks at will.
Reducing the number of polling places in certain areas is one of the tricks Republicans use to suppress the minority vote. Voting by mail renders that tactic obsolete. It's obvious why they find it objectionable.
It's impossible to prevent someone from commiting a crime.
The goal is to catch and prosecute them to minimize future crimes.
Peter, thank you for this level of detail.
As you can tell, there will still be those who think there is some conspiracy. They simply don't understand the process and its checks and balances.
They are also sore losers who cannot understand that, in any competition, someone will come out ahead and others will come behind.
I guess that's what happens when a generation of children grow up always getting a participation trophy and being told "you are all winners!".
In over 20 years of exclusive main voting in Oregon, to the best of my knowledge, there have been as many as 5 cases of attempted Voter fraud, and despite Republican whines, the low number does not mean that the absence if more prosecutions is not proof it is happening.
My point was not that fraud had occurred. My point was that vote my mail has many more points of vulnerability to fraud, and that this inherently reduces confidence in the voting process.
That vote by mail works in a very uncorrupt state like Oregon does not mean that its many vulnerabilities will not be exploited in, for instance, a state like Illinois.
An important engineering principle is that the simpler you can make a mechanism, the less likely it is to go wrong.
Does anyone think there’s a way to even KNOW if the ballot swapping I described, above, has happened? I can’t see any way to tell, since faked ballots would look exactly like real ones. How would a recount make any difference?
Not many people are skeptical about it.
Why do you want to make it more difficult for others to participate in democracy?
It seems you're a proponent of "fraud may occur" so let's make it harder for others to vote.
As Peter is explaining, fraud attempts are miniscule.
If you're concerned about election security you can bring up that red herring in that state.
From the Stanford website I mentioned, above: “Lastly, vote accuracy is also an issue, because voters have no way of confirming there vote, and there is also no way of conducting a recount with direct-recording electronic (DRE) voting. With DRE, there is no paper trail, no verification, and thus no scrutiny of the processes. Voter anonymity is also a problem. Voters have to provide much of their personal information to the systems for voter verification, and with that comes the problem of keeping voter information safe and keeping voters anonymous.
The cons against electronic voting laid out here are only some of the arguments against electronic voting. However, they are a good reflection of the ethical and technical concerns related to the issue of electronic voting.”
With so much possibility of fraud with mail in voting, why in hell are we using it? Are there manipulators who love it?
So, you prefer government ignore ways to be more cost efficient?
Vote by mail also increases participation in democracy. I don't think you can put a price on that.
RESPONSE:
Mail in voting creates a paper trail that is available in the moment and available for later audit. The notion that people could successfully counterfeit the paper, printing, punch holes, etc. in a ballot and insert them is beyond improbable. What is possible, I suppose, is that printed ballots are stolen. That then creates the new problem. Those ballots need to be assigned to specific humans in specific precincts and then voted for the people that person is eligible to vote for. So in the later audit, there is a document. A signature, a name, and an address.
Far, far easier to go to a place with in-person voting, show false ID and hope no one one at the place notices you, and if stopped to run out and try to disappear. I like paper trails and auditable elections.
Peter Sage
RESPONSE TO MALCOLM'S QUESTION.
I have a blog post addressing this for tomorrow.
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