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I went to a really good and interesting training session for election officials on Friday. It was titled "Election Official Ethics", but the presenter admitted that it might better be titled "Election Integrity". The class was essentially a look at two different issues troubling the voters - voter fraud, and election fraud. Concerns about voter fraud tend to be centered around the idea that "the wrong people" are voting or registering to vote, or people are casting multiple ballots. Election fraud is the idea that the properly cast ballots aren't being counted, or the results of the election are otherwise being tampered with.
Issues of voter fraud are handled mostly in a top-down way - there's a massive statewide database. If someone tries to vote in two different cities, they'll be caught. If someone tries to register in two different places, they'll be caught. Our voter lists are also compared against other state voter lists to make sure that ballots haven't been cast in another state. The database is checked frequently to clean up registration information, remove any duplicate registrations, and remove people from the voter rolls who have died. All the records in the state voter database are compared against DMV records and records at the Social Security Administration - whenever a discrepancy is found, a letter is sent to the address(es) on file asking the voter to contact the clerk's office, and a little note is put in the poll-book next to their name to ask for extra identification. Anything suspicious that isn't cleared up is sent to the DA for investigation and potential prosecution.
Now, there are some bottom-up things that are done to prevent voter fraud, too. A couple of days before the election, a list of felons who can't vote is printed off and sent to each polling place. The new election laws in place prevent voting after you've sent in an absentee ballot (even though that would be spotted when we run the absentee ballots), so now there are little marks in the pollbook next to the names of folks who requested an absentee ballot. If there's time, and not a line, we ask every person who comes in if they requested and submitted an absentee ballot or participated in early voting - if the answer is yes, then you can't vote, and we turn you away. If there's more of a crunch of voters, we only ask the people with the mark next to their names - usually, they've requested an absentee ballot but not sent it off in the mail, or they lost it before voting, so it's fine. We also check the registration forms carefully, and point out when people fill them out that it is a legal document and they're signing a statement saying they filled things out accurately. So yes, someone might lie, or provide false information while filling out a registration form, but there are all kinds of checks in place to catch that. Every poll worker is trained just before an election - nobody is coasting on what they've done for years - and we're kept up to date with changes and challenges to the laws. We know when you need to fill out a new registration form, when you're not allowed, and what forms of ID are valid.
The portion of the talk on election fraud was the most interesting to me, personally. Working at the polls, you're immersed in all this redundancy and paperwork. At each polling place there are two pollbooks. In the pollbooks are the names and addresses of every registered voter, and a little box for them to sign by their name when they come in to vote. When a person comes in to vote, they state their name and address, we look them up simultaneously in each pollbook, have them sign one of them, and we write their voter number in both books. The ballots are initialed by two different people - and the second set of initials goes on only just before we hand the ballot to a voter. At the end of the night, we record the last voter number (which has to match up with the number of ballots counted by the tabulator), and people sign the front of the pollbooks saying that they certify the contents. The pollbooks should match up - the voter number by "John Xyzzy" that's signed in one should be the same number by "John Xyzzy" in the unsigned book (and this is the part of process that's most prone to error, as people get chatty and lines build up and flipping back and forth between the books you transpose a number here or there. When there's a lull we'll go through page-by-page and make sure everything is right). There are seals and numbers on the seals and all kinds of things to keep track of, but all of this is to absolutely ensure that our elections are fair and honest, and all of the record-keeping is to make it as transparent as possible.
In Madison (and I can only speak for Madison, because elections are run a little differently in the different municipalities of Wisconsin, overseen by the city and county clerks), marked ballots are never left alone. Even in the clerk's office, there will be two employees present at all times, and at the end of the day, they're sealed and locked in a vault. There are chain-of-custody documents for every single step of the process.
The really neat part is how the tabulators are certified. Obviously, if you want to fix an election, the easiest way is to mess with how the votes are counted by the counting machine. Now, the tabulators are big boxy devices, with a small hard drive inside. The drive is called the "PROM pack", and after it's programmed, each one is given a seal with a unique number on it, and delivered to the city clerk's office. The clerks put the PROM packs into the tabulators, each of which is numbered and labeled with what polling place it will be going to. And then, for three full days before the election, each city holds public testing of the tabulators! You can go and watch, or participate, if you're interested (I totally didn't know this, until training). They take a bunch of ballots, and mark them - I believe that for the upcoming election on Tuesday there are 34 different permutations of ballots being tested in each machine, in Madison. Some are meant to be rejected (overvotes, marked with pencil, whatever). And then they run them through each and every machine. Madison has never once had a machine miscount a ballot during testing - though the testing does reveal mechanical errors in the tabulators pretty frequently. These things get quite a workout, and so the most common error is that the intake simply jams and it won't take in the ballot correctly. The machines that don't work well won't get sent out. After testing, the PROM packs are sealed into the tabulators, again with tracking numbers, and sent out to their polling places.
On election night, after the polls close, we break the seal on the outside of the tabulator and open up the machine and gather up all those ballots that were fed into it. The machine is supposed to separate out any ballots with write-in votes on them into a compartment in the front, but we flip through all the ballots anyway to make sure none slipped through and that the machine didn't malfunction. The write-ins are taken care of by hand (which is why joke-y write-in votes always kind of irritate me. It's your right to vote however you please, but each vote for Donald Duck is extra work for an election official) and the PROM pack is carefully removed from the machine. We double check to make sure the seal is intact and the numbers all match, then put the PROM pack and one set of the readouts from the machine into a special bag. That bag is sealed, signed by three people, and the numbers on the seal are written down on the chief inspector's statement. Two of the people who signed off on it take the bag and drive it downtown and deliver it to the county clerk. The PROM pack is never alone, never unsealed.
Back at the polling place, the actual marked ballots are put into a really big bag and sealed, along with other official documents from the day - everyone who's left working signs off on the bag. I'm pretty sure that the bag is sealed back up in the tabulator compartment and locked, and then collected by the city clerk, but I'm usually the one who drives the PROM pack downtown, so I'm not actually certain (I should probably stay and not go downtown Tuesday, so I get more experience with this part of it, come to think of it). I do know that there's a chain of custody, and the bag is really obvious if it gets tampered with. You don't seal that sucker up until you're absolutely certain you don't need to put anything else in there.
And if someone wants to see those ballots, hand count them? Well, that's something that can be requested under the Freedom of Information act, and the clerk will make that happen. At least, Madison's clerk will.
The whole thing is a fascinating process, really - a dance of bureaucracy that actually has purpose. Every step is documented, and all things are aimed toward increasing voter confidence in the process. I love how transparent it all is. I also think it's really interesting to see how things fall out between people worried about voter fraud, and those worried about election fraud. For the most part, it's Republicans who are concerned about voter fraud, and Democrats who worry about election fraud. It's curious to me that it splits so neatly along ideological and party lines. I'm sure there's something to say about that (probably quite a lot of insightful analysis to be done there, actually) but I don't think I'm going to go there today. I'm having too much fun geeking out over the process, and looking forward to Tuesday, when I'll get to go be a big democracy nerd actively again. All you Wisconsin folks, be sure to vote!
Issues of voter fraud are handled mostly in a top-down way - there's a massive statewide database. If someone tries to vote in two different cities, they'll be caught. If someone tries to register in two different places, they'll be caught. Our voter lists are also compared against other state voter lists to make sure that ballots haven't been cast in another state. The database is checked frequently to clean up registration information, remove any duplicate registrations, and remove people from the voter rolls who have died. All the records in the state voter database are compared against DMV records and records at the Social Security Administration - whenever a discrepancy is found, a letter is sent to the address(es) on file asking the voter to contact the clerk's office, and a little note is put in the poll-book next to their name to ask for extra identification. Anything suspicious that isn't cleared up is sent to the DA for investigation and potential prosecution.
Now, there are some bottom-up things that are done to prevent voter fraud, too. A couple of days before the election, a list of felons who can't vote is printed off and sent to each polling place. The new election laws in place prevent voting after you've sent in an absentee ballot (even though that would be spotted when we run the absentee ballots), so now there are little marks in the pollbook next to the names of folks who requested an absentee ballot. If there's time, and not a line, we ask every person who comes in if they requested and submitted an absentee ballot or participated in early voting - if the answer is yes, then you can't vote, and we turn you away. If there's more of a crunch of voters, we only ask the people with the mark next to their names - usually, they've requested an absentee ballot but not sent it off in the mail, or they lost it before voting, so it's fine. We also check the registration forms carefully, and point out when people fill them out that it is a legal document and they're signing a statement saying they filled things out accurately. So yes, someone might lie, or provide false information while filling out a registration form, but there are all kinds of checks in place to catch that. Every poll worker is trained just before an election - nobody is coasting on what they've done for years - and we're kept up to date with changes and challenges to the laws. We know when you need to fill out a new registration form, when you're not allowed, and what forms of ID are valid.
The portion of the talk on election fraud was the most interesting to me, personally. Working at the polls, you're immersed in all this redundancy and paperwork. At each polling place there are two pollbooks. In the pollbooks are the names and addresses of every registered voter, and a little box for them to sign by their name when they come in to vote. When a person comes in to vote, they state their name and address, we look them up simultaneously in each pollbook, have them sign one of them, and we write their voter number in both books. The ballots are initialed by two different people - and the second set of initials goes on only just before we hand the ballot to a voter. At the end of the night, we record the last voter number (which has to match up with the number of ballots counted by the tabulator), and people sign the front of the pollbooks saying that they certify the contents. The pollbooks should match up - the voter number by "John Xyzzy" that's signed in one should be the same number by "John Xyzzy" in the unsigned book (and this is the part of process that's most prone to error, as people get chatty and lines build up and flipping back and forth between the books you transpose a number here or there. When there's a lull we'll go through page-by-page and make sure everything is right). There are seals and numbers on the seals and all kinds of things to keep track of, but all of this is to absolutely ensure that our elections are fair and honest, and all of the record-keeping is to make it as transparent as possible.
In Madison (and I can only speak for Madison, because elections are run a little differently in the different municipalities of Wisconsin, overseen by the city and county clerks), marked ballots are never left alone. Even in the clerk's office, there will be two employees present at all times, and at the end of the day, they're sealed and locked in a vault. There are chain-of-custody documents for every single step of the process.
The really neat part is how the tabulators are certified. Obviously, if you want to fix an election, the easiest way is to mess with how the votes are counted by the counting machine. Now, the tabulators are big boxy devices, with a small hard drive inside. The drive is called the "PROM pack", and after it's programmed, each one is given a seal with a unique number on it, and delivered to the city clerk's office. The clerks put the PROM packs into the tabulators, each of which is numbered and labeled with what polling place it will be going to. And then, for three full days before the election, each city holds public testing of the tabulators! You can go and watch, or participate, if you're interested (I totally didn't know this, until training). They take a bunch of ballots, and mark them - I believe that for the upcoming election on Tuesday there are 34 different permutations of ballots being tested in each machine, in Madison. Some are meant to be rejected (overvotes, marked with pencil, whatever). And then they run them through each and every machine. Madison has never once had a machine miscount a ballot during testing - though the testing does reveal mechanical errors in the tabulators pretty frequently. These things get quite a workout, and so the most common error is that the intake simply jams and it won't take in the ballot correctly. The machines that don't work well won't get sent out. After testing, the PROM packs are sealed into the tabulators, again with tracking numbers, and sent out to their polling places.
On election night, after the polls close, we break the seal on the outside of the tabulator and open up the machine and gather up all those ballots that were fed into it. The machine is supposed to separate out any ballots with write-in votes on them into a compartment in the front, but we flip through all the ballots anyway to make sure none slipped through and that the machine didn't malfunction. The write-ins are taken care of by hand (which is why joke-y write-in votes always kind of irritate me. It's your right to vote however you please, but each vote for Donald Duck is extra work for an election official) and the PROM pack is carefully removed from the machine. We double check to make sure the seal is intact and the numbers all match, then put the PROM pack and one set of the readouts from the machine into a special bag. That bag is sealed, signed by three people, and the numbers on the seal are written down on the chief inspector's statement. Two of the people who signed off on it take the bag and drive it downtown and deliver it to the county clerk. The PROM pack is never alone, never unsealed.
Back at the polling place, the actual marked ballots are put into a really big bag and sealed, along with other official documents from the day - everyone who's left working signs off on the bag. I'm pretty sure that the bag is sealed back up in the tabulator compartment and locked, and then collected by the city clerk, but I'm usually the one who drives the PROM pack downtown, so I'm not actually certain (I should probably stay and not go downtown Tuesday, so I get more experience with this part of it, come to think of it). I do know that there's a chain of custody, and the bag is really obvious if it gets tampered with. You don't seal that sucker up until you're absolutely certain you don't need to put anything else in there.
And if someone wants to see those ballots, hand count them? Well, that's something that can be requested under the Freedom of Information act, and the clerk will make that happen. At least, Madison's clerk will.
The whole thing is a fascinating process, really - a dance of bureaucracy that actually has purpose. Every step is documented, and all things are aimed toward increasing voter confidence in the process. I love how transparent it all is. I also think it's really interesting to see how things fall out between people worried about voter fraud, and those worried about election fraud. For the most part, it's Republicans who are concerned about voter fraud, and Democrats who worry about election fraud. It's curious to me that it splits so neatly along ideological and party lines. I'm sure there's something to say about that (probably quite a lot of insightful analysis to be done there, actually) but I don't think I'm going to go there today. I'm having too much fun geeking out over the process, and looking forward to Tuesday, when I'll get to go be a big democracy nerd actively again. All you Wisconsin folks, be sure to vote!
