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So yesterday we completed our city election which was conducted without any in-person voting. Being on the business end of a "mail-in" election I figured I'd do a debriefing, consider this an Ask Me Anything about mail-in voting.
First, mail-in voting and absentee voting are the same thing, the process is identical. For the benefit of folks that have never voted absentee that process is as follows:
Voters need to complete a form with their voter information and signature and that form serves as an oath swearing that you are who you say you are and that form and your completed ballot are sent in together. When we receive your ballot that oath is checked against the list of registered voters and we check off that the vote has been received and assuming that you are on the list the ballot is then opened and counted. In our county the actual counting is done via optical scanner and the paper ballots are saved in case a recount is needed. We have separate people doing the checking in of voters and doing the scanning, so the check-in people never see the completed ballots and the scanning people never see who the ballot came from in order to keep the votes anonymous.
The one difference between absentee ballots of the past and doing all all-mail election is the volume of ballots you have to process and that does create some logistical headaches. For our little city election we counted 2,077 ballots and split up the process over 4 days - it took us about 17 hours with a 7 person team to do that, that's processing about 122 ballots an hour. For November, if our county gets what it got in 2016 it's going to take 1,347 hours of processing to count them all - now they're obviously going to have more than the 1 team counting votes, but still, that's going to be a multi-day task no matter how you slice it.
Normally absentee ballots are counted after the in-person ballots, but I'm hoping the county is allowed to begin counting them early as we were in order to have timely results. By having 3 processing days before the actual election day we were able to complete the process and announce a result almost immediately after the deadline for receiving votes as we only had to count the last minute voters, the rest were already done.
Potential problems with mail-in voting:
One is user error, about 5% of the ballots we received we were not able to count because we didn't have an oath to go with the ballot and so had no way to check if the ballot actually came from a registered voter. Be sure to read the instructions that come with your absentee ballot and follow them.
The second is relying on the USPS for delivering and receiving votes. The Maryland primary election was plagued by voters not getting their ballots in time. This problem can be mitigated by having pick-up and drop-off locations independent of the postal service. We used 3 drop boxes for ballots so that voters did not need to depend on the mail to get their votes in on time and that seemed to work very well, but I'm sure the city will get a trickle of votes mailed too late for them to count. Do not wait until the last minute to send in your votes!
Despite those two potential problems, the turn-out was amazing, we got 38% and the highest previous in the history of the city was 29%, so having the election be mail-in only definitely did not discourage participation. I'll also say the actual processing of votes went very smoothly, no problems were encountered, but as mentioned above it is slower than in-person voting. Come election day in November there is a very good chance we will not have results the same day.
Things that are not a problem:
Voter fraud. There is very little opportunity for fraud in this process. I suppose someone might be able to try and impersonate another voter, but if that voter also sent in a vote or any of the poll workers know that person then you're going to get caught, and you better believe we'd send that on to the state police. Even if you had a crooked judge there isn't anything they could do as none of us are working independently at any time, plus there are poll watchers observing the process. We had exactly 2 ballots come in that weren't in our poll books - and those might very well be legitimate as we know our poll books were missing last minute registrations (those 2 are not thrown out, they're counted as provisional while the county double checks their registration rolls). We did not have any evidence of anyone trying to vote more than once.
Pandemic safety thoughts. That this is safer than an in-person election is without question. For the voters there is no risk at all as they can complete the process without coming into any physical contact with another person. For us poll workers there is still some danger, we are inside for a prolonged period with other people - but fortunately not many. Most of the time counting workers, poll watchers, and city employees there were 10 people spread out across 2 large rooms, and we were all masked the whole time. Compare that to an in-person polling place which is also inside and the poll workers come into contact with literally thousands of voters, the chance of Covid-19 transmission is obviously going to be higher in-person. Even places that are allowing in-person voting in November I'd encourage you to take advantage of absentee options for the sake of everyone's safety.
Any questions?
First, mail-in voting and absentee voting are the same thing, the process is identical. For the benefit of folks that have never voted absentee that process is as follows:
Voters need to complete a form with their voter information and signature and that form serves as an oath swearing that you are who you say you are and that form and your completed ballot are sent in together. When we receive your ballot that oath is checked against the list of registered voters and we check off that the vote has been received and assuming that you are on the list the ballot is then opened and counted. In our county the actual counting is done via optical scanner and the paper ballots are saved in case a recount is needed. We have separate people doing the checking in of voters and doing the scanning, so the check-in people never see the completed ballots and the scanning people never see who the ballot came from in order to keep the votes anonymous.
The one difference between absentee ballots of the past and doing all all-mail election is the volume of ballots you have to process and that does create some logistical headaches. For our little city election we counted 2,077 ballots and split up the process over 4 days - it took us about 17 hours with a 7 person team to do that, that's processing about 122 ballots an hour. For November, if our county gets what it got in 2016 it's going to take 1,347 hours of processing to count them all - now they're obviously going to have more than the 1 team counting votes, but still, that's going to be a multi-day task no matter how you slice it.
Normally absentee ballots are counted after the in-person ballots, but I'm hoping the county is allowed to begin counting them early as we were in order to have timely results. By having 3 processing days before the actual election day we were able to complete the process and announce a result almost immediately after the deadline for receiving votes as we only had to count the last minute voters, the rest were already done.
Potential problems with mail-in voting:
One is user error, about 5% of the ballots we received we were not able to count because we didn't have an oath to go with the ballot and so had no way to check if the ballot actually came from a registered voter. Be sure to read the instructions that come with your absentee ballot and follow them.
The second is relying on the USPS for delivering and receiving votes. The Maryland primary election was plagued by voters not getting their ballots in time. This problem can be mitigated by having pick-up and drop-off locations independent of the postal service. We used 3 drop boxes for ballots so that voters did not need to depend on the mail to get their votes in on time and that seemed to work very well, but I'm sure the city will get a trickle of votes mailed too late for them to count. Do not wait until the last minute to send in your votes!
Despite those two potential problems, the turn-out was amazing, we got 38% and the highest previous in the history of the city was 29%, so having the election be mail-in only definitely did not discourage participation. I'll also say the actual processing of votes went very smoothly, no problems were encountered, but as mentioned above it is slower than in-person voting. Come election day in November there is a very good chance we will not have results the same day.
Things that are not a problem:
Voter fraud. There is very little opportunity for fraud in this process. I suppose someone might be able to try and impersonate another voter, but if that voter also sent in a vote or any of the poll workers know that person then you're going to get caught, and you better believe we'd send that on to the state police. Even if you had a crooked judge there isn't anything they could do as none of us are working independently at any time, plus there are poll watchers observing the process. We had exactly 2 ballots come in that weren't in our poll books - and those might very well be legitimate as we know our poll books were missing last minute registrations (those 2 are not thrown out, they're counted as provisional while the county double checks their registration rolls). We did not have any evidence of anyone trying to vote more than once.
Pandemic safety thoughts. That this is safer than an in-person election is without question. For the voters there is no risk at all as they can complete the process without coming into any physical contact with another person. For us poll workers there is still some danger, we are inside for a prolonged period with other people - but fortunately not many. Most of the time counting workers, poll watchers, and city employees there were 10 people spread out across 2 large rooms, and we were all masked the whole time. Compare that to an in-person polling place which is also inside and the poll workers come into contact with literally thousands of voters, the chance of Covid-19 transmission is obviously going to be higher in-person. Even places that are allowing in-person voting in November I'd encourage you to take advantage of absentee options for the sake of everyone's safety.
Any questions?