Elections - from 19Nov20:

This year, I was assistant head election judge in five (!) elections – two special (bye-) elections to fill a State house vacancy, the Presidential primary, the general primary, and the general November election. For each, I was asked to be in charge of hourly audits and the ballot tally. So what are those, and why do they exist?

Ballot tally

Obviously, we want to guard against counterfeit and unofficial ballots being stuffed into the ballot box. (We use an electronic scanner called a tabulator that scans each ballot, stores a scan of each ballot, and records and automatically counts each vote, but the ballot tally requirement – and the idea of stuffing a ballot box – predates such machinery.) Each precinct is issued a number of ballots appropriate to that location, which are delivered in a locked container – nowadays, the ballot storage area of the tabulator. The morning of the poll, the container is unlocked in view of two election judges/poll workers (hereafter “judges”), and the ballot transport boxes opened. Inside is a set number of ballots – usually twice as many ballots as expected voters. In November, that was 1600, two boxes each with 800 ballots. The ballots are shrink-wrapped in packs of, nominally, 100. As needed, two judges open and count each pack – about 10% of the time, there are 99 or 101 ballots. Both judges initial the ballots. Each voter gets one ballot – unless they make a mistake, in which case they can get a new ballot, in exchange for the old, which is then “spoiled.” At the end of the polling day, the ballots are tallied. Each still unopened pack is counted as 100, to which is added the number of cast ballots (remember the tabulator machine has been counting cast ballots all day – the current number is publicly displayed on each machine, and two judges verified the number was “0” before the polls opened), and the number of spoiled ballots, which have been placed in a specially marked envelope, to be sealed and returned to the city election office. That number should equal the number issued, as adjusted for packs with excess or insufficient ballots. It usually does, unless a voter was able to walk off with their ballot from the polling place, rather than cast it into the machine.

That's the easy count.

Voter receipt audits

Each voter, once they have signed the (now electronic) poll book, is given a ballot receipt, which they take to the ballot judge(s). The judge takes the receipt from them, numbers it sequentially, and gives them a ballot. Every hour, the AHEJ (me!) records the current highest sequential ballot receipt number and compares it to the “public count” on the tabulator – remember that machine has been counting the number of cast ballots all day. The receipt number should (must) match the number of the public count when that count is added to the number of voters still filling out their ballots at the moment the public count is read. For example, the receipt number is 137, the public count is 134, and three voters are filling out ballots. So in this case we're good - the numbers balance. It can be tricky determining how many voters are filling out ballots – not everyone at the booths is voting – some are assisting voters, some are judges. And in our combined precincts (we had two precincts in one space in August and November, as the physical space formerly allocated to one of the precincts was too small to permit social distancing), we had to figure out if a voter was from Ward 1 or Ward 2.

The number is not infrequently off when the initial audit concludes. Usually what has happened is that a ballot judge has misnumbered a receipt - “238” instead of “237” - skipping a number; or “238” instead of “239” - repeating a number. The AHEJ renumbers, by hand, ALL the misnumbered receipts – anywhere from say 6 to 90 slips of paper, depending on when the error occurred and how busy it is. If the numbers stubbornly remain off, we have to call the city election office and let them know, and what we did to try and fix the error. It is also logged into an incident log.

In the special primary, our penultimate voter got upset that there were no Republicans on the ballot – none had filed for the office. Very upset. He tore the ballot into little pieces, and threw them in and around the trash can. If we left it there, it would affect both audits. So clipped the pieces together and put them into the spoiled ballot envelope. But, since one more ballot was issued than was cast, our voter receipt audit was unalterably off. We noted it in the log. And even though we would be physically at the city election office in a half-hour, we called it in, too.

So, what a county canvassing board is supposed to do is NOT ensure that there are no discrepancies in the audits and tallies. Those are going to happen. Nor reject all the ballots from an area if the discrepancies strike them as “too high.” Instead the canvass board is to ascertain the number of votes polled; this is a purely “ministerial” duty, with no exercise of judgment required or indeed permitted.

See, e.g., opinion of Washington State Attorney General, AGO 49-51 No. 385. https://www.atg.wa.gov/.../elections-duties-county...

If a candidate believes the discrepancies indicate an intolerable situation, it is up to the candidate (NOT a member of the canvassing board) to ask for judicial review, and it up to the judge (NOT a member of the canvassing board) to resolve the dispute.