WASHINGTON – To hear President Donald Trump and his allies count it, every step of the vote by mail is an open door for rampant fraud to enter the election, from the moment ballots are printed until they are finally counted.
But election officials and candidates who have come across the fence system say that human and computerized railings throughout the mail-in ballot journey create a structure that, while cumbersome and expensive, cannot be violated in any way. significant.
And with the integrity of voting by mail becoming a political issue and the coronavirus pushing more states and voters to use it, there are clear steps along the way to verify and verify ballots.
While not all states allow you to vote by mail without a reason. In 2016, approximately 1 in 4 votes were cast by mail, with more states moving in that direction.
Each state and local government does it differently. Election experts say that is part of what makes it so safe. With different systems in the United States for printing, delivering, and validating ballots, it would be extremely difficult for anyone to “hack” the presidential election across the board.
Here are the main milestones in a mail-in ballot trip:
Step 1: printed ballots
The mail-in ballot journey begins when local election officials verify an individual voter’s eligibility and send an order to the printer, where it is printed on special fraud-resistant paper, usually with a barcode that allows it to be tracked as a package.
Step 2: Mail-In Ballots
In some places, voters must proactively request a ballot, while other areas submit all voter requests.
Strongly Republican Salt Lake County, Utah began to send each registered and active voter a real ballot. County Clerk Sherrie Swenson says turnout rose to almost 80 percent in 2018, almost unknown rates for a midterm election.
“We are making sure we do address updates with the National Address Change,” says Swensen. “We are constantly cleaning up our lists and making sure they are spotless.”
Step 3: completed ballots
After the ballots arrive in the mail, it’s up to the candidates to make sure their followers fill out theirs and return them before the deadline. That requires a different kind of effort to get out of the vote than the traditional kind meant to mobilize supporters to physically go to a polling place on Election Day.
Democrat Suraj Patel learned that lesson this summer in his long-range primary bet against longtime Rep Carolyn Maloney, DN.Y. With the coronavirus sweeping New York this spring, Gov. Andrew Cuomo ordered that an absentee ballot request be mailed to every registered voter.
The results are still being counted, but if Patel wins, it will be a major upset, due in large part to voting by mail, which made it central to his campaign strategy.
“We completely changed our organization and our strategy in our plan to get people to request ballots and then follow up and chase them to return those ballots,” Patel says in an interview. “Generally, we think of leaving the voting period as the last seven days of the election. We got to the last eight weeks of the election. “
Step 4: Returned Ballots
At home, voters stamp their completed ballots, sign them, and mail them. That’s one reason why Democrats are so concerned about Trump’s threats to cut funds for the US Postal Service. There are calls for a standardized policy that ballots postmarked before Election Day should be counted, Due to concerns that mail service may be slower in poorer minorities or much of the U.S.
The signature is then verified in the voter registration records by a poll worker, a computer, or both.
Step 5: Tickets validated and counted
You need fewer poll workers, usually retired volunteers, to make an election by mail. But you need more professionals available and more high-tech equipment to validate and count the ballots, ensuring that no one can vote twice.
“We have machines that record ballots when they are returned,” says Swensen of Salt Lake County. “We have a barcode on the ballot envelope, and when a ballot is returned, it automatically registers as received immediately,” with that voter marked throughout the system as having already turned in a ballot.
Charles Stewart, a voting technology expert who teaches at MIT, says that big municipalities or towns that carry out major mail-in voting operations should buy equipment that automatically tears the various envelopes and separates the ballots, machines that, according to it can cost a million dollars and take up a large warehouse space.
“It’s like buying a fire truck,” says Stewart. “And you’re buying dozens of these.”
And it can take time to count all the votes, particularly in places that are not used to handling a large volume of mail ballots.
Almost two weeks after the June 23 primaries in New York, the results are so close that no winner has been called, with Patel behind Maloney by less than a thousand votes with incomplete results.
The reason for the delay is the vote by mail, with a large number of absentee ballots leading state officials to delay the count until this week. That is raising concerns about how prepared the United States is to vote heavily by mail this November if the coronavirus keeps voters away from the polls.
Patel says that while the long wait for the election results is stressful, he is more confident in the mail-in voting process and that each vote will be counted early in the race.
“The truth is, we are learning this as we go,” says Patel. “Like everyone else.”
