In an era when the integrity of elections is often called into question, the directors of several Southwest Ohio Boards of Elections say voters’ ballots will be safe this year.
NPR reporting suggests that, while more voters trust their state and local officials to run a free election, there is still a fair amount of distrust this midterm season.
But Nicole Unzicker, director of the Butler County Board of Elections, is confident voters can trust the process.
“Ohio does it right,” Unzicker said. “We do feel we have a great security around our elections — that they're fair, safe and accurate because of these processes that are in place and have been in place for quite some time.”
Unzicker said all of Ohio’s boards of elections must adhere to strict guidelines.
“It doesn't waver between elections,” Unzicker said. "If 10 people turned out for an election, or 50,000, it's the same work that we're doing for every election.”
Key to the integrity of an election is bipartisanship, Unzicker and other election officials said.
In every county, the elections director and deputy director are members of opposite parties. And there must be an equal number of Democratic and Republican poll workers.
“We always have the opposite party that's with us anytime we are around a ballot, touching a ballot, entering our rooms, going into the central tabulating room,” said Stephanie Hemmer-Haight, director of the Clermont County Board of Elections.
Before the election
Warren County’s Board of Elections Director, Brian Sleeth, said distrust in the system can start long before the election, as candidates and political parties send absentee applications to voters, and sometimes they end up sending them to old or incorrect addresses
“‘Well, what about if I just fill that out? Can I get a ballot for that person?’” Sleeth said of questions he gets. “You can't unless you can forge their signature, know their ID, and now you're committing a fifth-degree felony.”
Ahead of early voting Sleeth said his office runs about 10 “little, mini elections” as part of the state’s logic and accuracy testing process.
First, they test poll books — often tablets used to call up a voter’s registration information — to make sure voters are tied to their correct precinct.
Then, Sleeth said election officials feed ballots, with a predetermined pattern, into the county’s voting machines.
The testing is the same in Butler County, said its Board of Elections’ Deputy Director Eric Corbin.
“We can see, ‘Yes, these are the results I expected to get,’” Corbin said. “We can be confident that the machines are recording the votes the way that we intend them to.”
Sleeth added the simulated results are also sent to the state, “to make sure that votes didn't flip or something in the process, when they're going through the World Wide Web.”
Clermont County’s Board of Elections Deputy Director, Chris Dennison, said, in addition to individual voting machines, the county’s central tabulator is tested using the same process.
During the election
As a county receives absentee ballots leading up to Election Day, election officials ensure they’re not different from the ones originally sent to voters.
Unzicker added no one in Butler County knows the results of early voting before the polls close on Election Day.
“That has been a question in the past. They say, ‘Well, if you're opening and you're scanning them in, then you have results,’” Unzicker said. “That's not the case. There is a difference between scanning the information and tabulating, and we do not tabulate until 7:30 on election night.”
When the polls close, Haight said a bipartisan team of poll workers must bring the physical paper ballots and memory sticks — flash drives that hold the results from each voting machine — back to the board of elections.
County systems are airgapped, Sleeth said, and “we can't introduce a stick that ever touched [an] outside computer…to a computer that's never been connected to the internet.”
Unzicker added there’s a system of seals on important equipment, too.
“That is a question that we get. ‘How do you know?’” Unzicker said. “We'll know if that seal is broken and a new one was put on.”
After the election
After Election Day, Unzicker said the Board of Elections has 21 days to certify the results.
Though some people get concerned when the final tally is different from election night’s unofficial results, Unzicker said that’s normal because her office must give people who voted provisionally time to “cure” their ballot. Voters cast provisional ballots when their eligibility can’t be confirmed on Election Day, but they must visit the Board of Elections afterward to show proper documentation for the vote to count.
Dennison added election officials must also verify people who recently moved didn’t cast two ballots, in two different counties.
Even after the results are official, midterms work isn’t over until it’s nearly Christmas, Sleeth said, because boards must then audit 5% of ballots cast, from randomly chosen voting machines.
“We have to literally sit here, take all the ballots out and hand count them,” Sleeth said. “We have to match the machine count. 100% has to match.”
All three counties’ officials said they’ve never had an issue with their audits being inaccurate.
“I do it for my job for sure. But I do it because I'm a voter as well, and I'm going to be just as careful with your vote as I am with my vote,” said Shari Huff, deputy director of Warren County’s Board of Elections.
To learn more about this topic, tune in to Cincinnati Edition on Oct. 13.
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