As seen by an official observer
On July 6th I wrote a plea to my readers for volunteers to serve as Spokane County Election Observers for the Democratic Party. I was immensely pleased to hear yesterday that seventy of the readers of this email responded, a number that should sufficient to fill out all the time slots. Spokane County’s (and Washington State’s) ballot handling system is already processing ballots mailed in for the August 2 Primary Election deadline. Today I want to pass along the experience of one of the observers, Dan Simonson, after his first session of observing the process of ballot handling:
I signed up as an election observer with the Democratic Party. I then attended a 1-hour class at the Spokane County Elections center at 1033 W Gardner Ave. The center is in a completely nondescript industrial-looking building that also houses the Public Defenders office and a few others.
The class went over the whole process of securing the election integrity, which was pretty impressive! I had no idea the lengths to which they go to make sure that not only is every ballot counted, but that there are always at least _two_ people involved any time a ballot or a ballot envelope is touched. Log sheets, signed off by the staff, accompany each batch of ballots, and security is pretty tight.
Once I had taken the class, and signed an attestation form, I was good to go to become an observer.
Friday at 8:30 am I showed up for my 2-hour shift. I had to sign in and obtain a badge on a lanyard, the badge had my name on it and “Democrat” in blue at the bottom.
There were three of us, two Democrats and one Republican. Another Republican came later. We were escorted in to the first stage area. This is where the ballot envelopes are handled.
Sorting Ballot Envelopes and Capturing Signatures
The ballots are delivered in bulk from the Post Office and ballot boxes. They sit in bins of about 200, not sorted at all. I sat behind a dividing rope and observed the ballot envelope sorter. An amazing machine. Reminded me of visiting the Coca-Cola bottling plant when I was a kid (rumor had it that if you watched long enough, they would give you a free coke – I watched a _long_ time before getting one!)
The worker set up the machine by running a test envelope through. It is one long conveyor belt-type of operation, but the envelopes are fed in, one at a time, vertically (standing up, not flat) and they then run by a camera that does two things: it reads the bar code containing your name and address and legislative district, and takes a photo of your signature. I would say that when running, two – three ballot envelopes a second pass by the camera.
Right after the camera, there are a bunch of bins lining the belt on either side. There are bins for each Legislative District (LDs 3, 4, and 6 and parts of LDs 7 & 9), one for the “no signature” envelopes (more on those later) and one for errors, such as a blurry bar code or some other defect. A gate clicks open to intercept an appropriate ballot envelope, and you watch them pile up quickly. Once the batch is run through, the worker fills in a piece of paper with information from the computer screen attached to the machine, which gives the batch number, the number of ballot envelopes, etc. He signed it and put it in a tray, which was then taken by another worker and the info entered into another computer.
One interesting point: these folks take their work very seriously. At the machine were TWO workers. At one point, the one guy needed to get some gloves, and had to call the supervisor over to relieve him so that the other guy wouldn’t be left alone with the ballot envelopes. No funny business.
Once the ballot envelopes are run through for the “first pass”, the “no signature” envelopes are taken away (about 2 – 5 for each run of 200, it seemed) and those voters are notified by mail that they need to sign the ballot, I can’t tell you how it works beyond that.
Signature Verification
Here’s a very cool thing: Every single ballot envelope signature is then verified. Prior to this, I had imagined that signature verification was done randomly, using some pre-determined random sampling scheme. Nope. Every signature is looked at by a worker and compared to your “signature on file”, which can be either the signature on your voter registration form or the signature on your driver license.
Here’s how that works. I was escorted over to the signature verification area, where there were 4 workers gazing at two computer screens each. I could watch what they were seeing on monitors placed in front of the observers for that purpose. Each monitor displays the signature area and the names of 4 ballot envelopes horizontally across the screen. Below the signature captured on the ballot envelope photo (by the previous machine, see above) are displayed not only the signatures on file for that person, but also the signatures on file for anyone else at that address! So if there is a discrepancy, they can try to figure out if it was signed by another member of the voters’ family, I guess.
Upon visual inspection, the worker decides whether to accept the signature or reject it. There were some great examples of “judgment calls”, and all rejected signatures are then examined by the supervisor and handled somehow.
Ballot Handling
After signature verification, the ballot batches are recounted (to account for losses in the signature verification process, etc.) and the count noted again.
Important: Up to this point, the ballots have not left their envelopes. All of this processing is done on the envelopes. At the next station, the ballots that have passed inspection (signatures that match, readable barcodes, etc.) are removed from their envelopes and stacked together, ready for the next step, the actual counting. At this point, however, my shift was up, so I never got to see the ballot counting machine, which was in a separate room with lots of windows looking in, but locked tight.
So there you have it – hopefully I will get to see the ballot counter on my next shift, but I have signed up for morning shifts so I may miss it. Anyone out there lucky enough to see the ballot counter working, let us know!
Dan Simonson
I’m looking forward to a later observer report on the efforts made to “cure” the envelopes with questionable signatures (or other errors) before the envelopes are opened and the ballots separated from their envelopes and the anonymized ballot sent to the counting machine.
Keep to the high ground,
Jerry