Voting: The Role of Process
A lot of attention in the technical elections community has to do with the actual mechanism for casting a vote, and in particular the use and type of voting machines, risk-limiting audits, etc. But the process of actually getting to cast the ballot is quite important, too. I was a poll worker in New Jersey in 2008 for Obama’s first term. We encountered quite a number of interesting situations, things not well covered by our training, but important for the honesty and accuracy of the process. It’s worth describing what happened.
I should note: this is just a small part of the full set of processes involved. It’s limited to what I saw personally as a poll worker and not even all of that—I was not an election official. There is more information on voting and process in some class slides of mine.
Background: in New Jersey in 2008, so-called DRE (Direct Recordinh Electronic) voting machines were used. Voters would check in at a desk, sign the poll book, and be handed a ticket. They would hand the ticket to another poll worker at a machine; this person would then unlock the machine and let them vote. When they finished voting, they were supposed to press a large red button to cast their vote and reset the machine. The tickets were all numbered. The number of each ticket would be written in the poll book next to their name; their voter registration number would be written on the ticket. (It’s a useful exercise for a security person to understand why both such numbers were needed, and what threats this does and does not protect against.)
Fleeing voters: A voter who leaves without pressing the button is called a fleeing voter. How should this be handled? There have been instances where poll workers have gone into the machine and changed the votes to what they or the local political bosses wanted. An alternative is to just reset the machine, causing that person’s vote to be lost. The third choice, which I saw done, was for a worker to reach inside the curtain, without looking, to press the button. Is this the best option? It is if the workers are honest—but are they honest? (A quick Google search suggests that some jurisdictions permit this if two poll workers of different parties do this cooperatively.)
Court orders: If someone believes that they are registered, but their name does not appear in the poll book they can cast what is called a provisional ballot. This is handled like an absentee ballot: the actual ballot is inside a secrecy envelope, which in turn is enclosed in an envelope with the person’s name and address. That permits later verification of their registration status. If it is determined that they are in fact, registered, the inner envelope is opened by someone else, someone who has not seen their name and address, and the ballot is counted. If not, the inner envelope is discarded, unopened. However, there is another possibility: you could obtain a court order, allowing you to vote on the voting machines. We were informed, in fact, that every judge in the county was on duty that day to handle such requests. One person, a young Black woman, came to us with a court order. How do we handle this? What do we write on the ticket? Where do we write the ticket number? The poll workers all got together to discuss this issue. She got rather agitated, thinking we were trying to deny her the right to vote on the machine, despite her court order, but we just had to figure out the proper procedure. Our eventual solution was to write on our copy of the court order "Court Order #1," write that on the ticket, and write the ticket number on the court order. That would provide the same sort of cross checking that an entry in the poll book would have. (Aside: given the racial issues in the election, for the first several hours of voting there was an observer from the ACLU to ensure that we were not trying to exclude minority voters. He was satisfied that we were not and left before this particular incident took place.)
Wrong person: Someone came in, gave us his name, and signed the poll book entry for that name. Later on, someone else came in, and gave the same name and address. (Generally speaking, we were legally barred from asking for ID.) A bit of inquiry let us figure out that this was a father and son, senior and junior. The father had signed the wrong line in the poll book and nobody had noticed. We eventually told the son to sign in his father’s slot. Arguably, he should’ve been told to cast a provisional ballot.
