Charting the democratic process

SPOKANE - Voting is a process - one as essential to our democracy as yeast is to making a good loaf of bread.

On it's surface, that process involves the voter opening their ballot, reading and learning about candidates and measures up for consideration, properly making their choice and then sealing and returning said ballot.

That's on the surface.

Like an iceberg, most of what takes place at the Spokane County Elections Department - and similar departments around the state - happens beneath the surface and between voting cycles. For county Auditor Vicky Dalton, those cycles are not limited to the few weeks around election day.

"In reality, about half the year is spent in an election cycle," she said.

The department runs four elections each year, special elections in February and April, a primary in August and the general in November. Each election cycle begins six weeks prior to election day and 2-3 weeks after until that election is certified by the Spokane County Canvassing Board.

Counting ballots

The sexy part of the voting process - if there is one - starts once ballots begin to return, just under three weeks before election day under Washington's all-mail-in voting system. Ballots come to the Elections Department located in a former Graybar Electric warehouse on West Maxwell purchased by the county in 2001 via mail bags if retrieved from drop boxes or in postal trays if returned by mail.

Ballots are run through a sorting machine, which cost $320,000 when purchased in 2006, that scans a bar code on the return envelope unique to that specific voter. The sorter also scans and stores the voter signature on the envelope in the department's data base where election workers at monitors in another room pull up those signatures and compare them to the appropriate voter signature on file.

The sorted ballots are placed in blue bins, and after the signatures have been verified, are run through the sorter a second time.

"Envelope signatures that did not match the signature in the voter's record are separated (and) a letter is sent to the voter within 24 hours with instructions to cure the signature," Dalton said.

Envelopes with signatures that match are sorted into red bins by voter precinct to be tabulated. They are then taken to another part of the large sorting room where election employees open the return envelopes. The return envelopes and unopened security envelopes are placed in separate bins and taken to another room where the return envelopes are put in boxes for storage, the security envelopes are opened and the ballots placed in red bins then placed on wheeled racks.

The racks of ballots are wheeled into a Voted Ballot Room first, and then into the tabulation room. An "Opening Sheet" follows the ballots throughout this process, beginning with the separation of the security envelope from the return envelope.

The Opening Sheet has a bin number and the number of ballots in each bin. The number of ballots in each bin must match at each stage; the number of ballots must match the number of return envelopes and the sheet is signed/initialed and dated at each stage.

The tabulation room has three tabulation stations, which consist of a scanner and a laptop loaded with tabulation software. Dalton said the county uses software manufactured by Clear Ballot.

Election workers take bins from the stack, review the Opening Sheet, and begin putting ballots into the scanner, monitoring their progress on the laptop. At the end of scanning each bin, which is labeled by precinct, the ballots are placed in a cardboard box, and another sheet with the date, election type and tracking number placed over that precinct. This prevents precincts from getting mixed together and allows for future recounts should one be required.

Access to the tabulation rooms is restricted to election workers only. That access - including outside of election cycles for maintenance and software updates - can only be done by certain people using a card reader system.

Dalton is not one of these.

"Since I have no reasons to be in there, my badge cannot be used to unlock the door," she said.

Also in the tabulation room are a pair of adjudicator stations where two individuals review ballots where questions arise regarding the voter's intention, such as partially filled in ovals, crossed out names and circles around voter responses. Trained election workers review these ballots, utilizing a reference manual with examples of voter intentions if needed, to determine what the voter's selection may be.

All of the data inputted in the tabulation room goes into a server that is located in the room and is not connected to any outside office system or the internet.

"It's totally and completely isolated," Dalton said.

Fifteen minutes before the voting information is to be released on the department's website and to the Secretary of State's office, the Clear Ballot software tabulates the votes for their respective candidates or decisions on measures. That information is then downloaded to a memory stick formatted for the data, and then uploaded to the two websites via a separate office PC.

"These are special memory sticks that are totally wiped clean after we upload and not reused for any purpose," Dalton said.

Life between cycles

This process continues, albeit in reduced manner as fewer ballots arrive, over the next several days until all ballots properly postmarked by election day are counted. But there's no rest as election workers turn their sights on the next election - which in this case is the Nov. 2 General Election.

Ballots for the general election must be designed by Sept. 2 so they can be mailed to the printer on Sept. 3. That's to enable the department to mail the approximately 5,400 ballots to military and overseas area voters by mid-September.

In the 2020 General Election, the county distributed - mostly by mail - ballots to 363,108 registered voters.

Providing an extra challenge for the upcoming election is that two items to appear on the ballot are being contested in court. One of those is regarding the city of Spokane's Proposition 1, which would amend the city's charter to adopt the Spokane Cleaner Energy Protection Act.

The other is concerning allegations that Spokane City Council Position 4 candidate Tyler McMaster has not lived in the city for at least a year, a requirement for public office in Spokane.

Dalton said she has county lawyers and a couple court judges assigned to resolving these issues, and believes this can be done by Aug. 27 so as not to delay the ballot printing process.

One of the biggest tasks for election employees is updating voter information. Each election the department receives delivery information from the U.S. Postal Service where ballots were returned due to voters no longer living at their indicated addresses.

Often the ballots are forwarded if there is a forwarding address on file, but Dalton said USPS still notifies the department the voter is no longer living there. They also receive information from the Department of Licensing of voters who have changed the current address on their vehicle licenses, but haven't updated their voter information.

And, there are ballots that are returned as undeliverable due to forwarding addresses no longer being on file. Dalton said the department deals with "thousands" of these each year.

"We send a lot of mail that are not ballots just trying to track people down," she added.

Voters can make sure there is no delay in receiving a ballot by updating their information at VoteWa.gov, as well as doing so at the Election's Department.

There are also physical items to be updated between voting cycles. Drop boxes throughout the county need to be cleaned, repaired and sometimes repainted while relationships with officials at remote voting assistance locations - such as CenterPlace in Spokane Valley and the Student Engagement Hub at Eastern Washington University - is updated.

Upgrades and maintenance to machinery such as the ballot sorter and the tabulation scanners is also needed, as are software updates from Clear Ballot. This is done by visits from company employees, who enter the locked and sealed tabulation room only with one other individual – an authorized county elections employee.

"Nothing comes in over the internet, nothing is mailed, emailed or shipped," Dalton said. "It's an actual person from the company that comes in and with people there from my staff do the update or upgrade to the computers or to the scanners."

Legislative intent

Finally, Dalton and staff must deal with new laws coming from the Legislature in Olympia. One of those from the previous session was a requirement for all elections departments to assemble, print and mail physical voter's guides.

Those voter's guides had to be in place for the Aug. 3 primary election. That meant adding a 32-page pamphlet to the over 40,000 pounds of paper the Spokane County Election's Department typically mails to voters - amounting to 235,000 pamphlets county-wide.

Another off-cycle election change is dealing with the requirements of Engrossed Substitute House Bill 1078 which changed voting for those convicted of a felony. Among several things, the measure eliminated the two-step approach to provisional and permanent restoration of a person's voting rights and replaced with the automatic restoration of those rights to individuals not "serving a sentence of total confinement under the jurisdiction of the DOC (Department of Corrections).

That includes individuals released from corrections centers but still subject to community custody. The new legislation takes effect Jan. 1, 2022.

"If you're behind bars, you can't vote," Dalton said. "If you're not behind bars, you can vote. It's that clear. It's that simple."

The change requires updates to the voter's oath taken when registering and agreed to when signing ballot return envelopes. Secretary of State Kim Wyman's Communication Director Kylee Zabel said the text of the former is dictated in ESHB 1078, while the latter is being worked on by Wyman and county auditors throughout the state.

"In this case, our office has the authority to draft new language and adopt into the WAC (Washington Administrative Code)," Zabel said. "This is also happening prior to 2022, but the new language has not been finalized yet."

And as if this isn't enough to do between cycles, Dalton added that election workers need training, at least 20 hours yearly to maintain their certifications. And, now and then, they need some time off as well.

"All workers in the elections office are employees, even if they work only a few hours a year," Dalton said. "We do not use volunteers in our office."

John McCallum can be reached at jmac@cheneyfreepress.com.