The American election process has integrity. There are simply no significant examples of ballot tampering, anywhere. Earlier this year, I volunteered four times as a ballot watcher for the campaign of Eileen Burke, the Democratic nominee for Cook County State’s Attorney. I observed transparent processes, thorough and serious people, and a fair system for determining a winner. Here’s details:
Signature review
This process happened in the 6th floor Offices of the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners, in a room with long tables and very large computer monitors. An election judge sits at a computer and compares the signatures of mail-in ballots to the reference signature that the voter placed on their voter registration card. Poll watchers from each campaign sit next to the election judge and take notes.
The idea is to make certain that the election judges don’t let any votes get through that were not completed by the voter and also to get a spot-check of the distribution of mail-in ballots— where in the city the votes are coming from. When mapped against the known election results, it gives you a thumbnail view of the race.
This process was done in complete silence— no one wanted to mess up the concentration of the election judge.
Ballot opening
This is a two-step process that occurs in the basement of the Board of Elections Commissioners offices.
The first step is to feed the unopened ballots into an automated letter-opening machine (pretty sure it was this brand:
https://www.pitneybowes.com/us/shipping-and-mailing/mailing-equipment/letter-openers-folders/omation-letter-opener.html). This slices the envelope so that it’s easy to pull out the contents without damage.
Then a judge delivers ballots grouped by ward in postal bins for teams of people to remove the ballots, unfold them, and stack them for feeding into the machine. The judges are seated and the watchers are standing— we were not allowed to sit.
This was also a good time to eyeball the actual votes cast, since the entire ballot was visible. Again, this gave a general feeling for how the mail-in ballots were trending.
There are four different types of workstations in the main basement ballot counting operation at 69 West Washington:
- A supervisor station, just to the left of the entrance
- ImageCast Central ballot counting units (“ICC”)units, where stacks of ballots are labeled and fed through the ballot counting machines. These are staffed by three to six people who have various jobs of preparing the stacks, labeling the stacks, feeding the stacks through the machine, and placing completed stacks into the rigid blue ward boxes
- Ballot bins, where the blue cooler –like ballot boxes, labeled by Ward, are lined up in rough ward number order
- Judge tables, where workers remove mail-in ballots and review them and stack them for feeding into the ballot counting machines. This is also where teams of two work on spoiled and damaged ballots
There is an area up front for media and for completing poll watching credentials. There is also a letter-opening machine in the far corner of the room. Here’s a schematic:
Damaged ballot recreation
Any ballots that were damaged in such a way that they couldn’t be fed through an automated ballot counter had to be recreated by hand.
This was a simple process of a supervisor printing a new blank ballot and giving it to a team of two people. One person reviews the damaged ballot and reads off the vote markings to the other, who recreates those votes on the new ballot. The ballot is then ready to be run through the automated ballot counting machine.
Adjudication of write-ins
This is the process of determining the intent of the voter when a write-in vote for alderman is ambiguous.
There were three sets of three election judges sitting side by side in front of three large monitors. The judges can zoom in to examine the write-in votes. They are given a pulldown menu of the valid choices and one option for “no vote”.
This was the process with the most leeway and judgment and I saw the election judges act with great integrity and honesty.
Ballot feeder scanning
This was the process of feeding stacks of ballots, grouped by ward, into one of seven ImageCast® Central machines. This is the final step in getting the vote actually tabulated and reported. The judge feeding the machine would call out how many votes were tabulated and poll watchers would write that down in order to check against the reported results. There were two other people at each station— one to prepare the ballots for scanning and one to place the scanned ballots into a box.
Here’s an image of me monitoring this process, along with a volunteer for the Harris campaign, that was published in a news article:
Elections are in good hands, everybody.