Even from my car, as we passed in the left lane, evidence of smiling helpful faces and eager voters fulfilling our national mandate appeared to the eyes as a clarion call to the ears.
Out front we met county press officer Philip, wearing a high-contrast yellow reflective vest and name badge. Philip gave us the lowdown on the orchestrated effort to reduce traffic and line time, the state and county police played a predominate roll. Also, a second drop site had been set up across the four-lane highway at Kmart.
Now the meat. Inside I set up the tripod and video camera, got shots of several vote casting stations provided for those citizens who didn't receive or lost a ballot, or simply preferred to come in and cast by hand. Oregon is a vote-by-mail state, but many county elections offices have voter's booths and offer provisional ballots, as mentioned above.
According to Philip, Washington County residents choose – for diverse reasons – to drop off their ballot on election day, hence the crazed scene described outside the building.
Ballots flow into the county office from every precinct, and are sorted and the outer envelope is removed by party workers. Other workers verify signatures on the back of the actual security envelope that contains the ballot by crosschecking voter registration cards via computer. And then the security envelopes are "wanded in", meaning each one's arrival is documented by hand-held bar code scanners.
The next part of the operation is all about straightening the ballots and feeding them into the computerized counting machines made to a large extent by a company called Elections Systems & Software (ES&S). Of course, ballot length changes from election to election, and the longer the ballot, the more difficult this process becomes, often causing delays and mistakes.
In a review of voting systems, the EVEREST Report found that every component of the ES&S optical scanning machines were vulnerable at the precinct level to physical tampering that would cause the machine to reboot, adding delays and confusion, as well as the PCMCIA memory cards the scanners use to encode ballot types. At the level of the board of elections office network attacks were found to be the biggest threat.
Although Philip, our press officer, and the staff he introduced us to, were helpful and knowledgeable, they could not bring themselves to believe what they inevitably termed conspiracy theories, and refused to believe my base assumption (formed of previous experience and research like the EVEREST Report) that all ballot counting software and hardware are risky and vulnerable to tampering.
In the moment I wished I had a hard copy of the EVEREST test results to show them, to make them see the danger, but although their heart was in the right place, their eyes were shackled with tunnel vision by training and a need to protect operations – and save face.
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