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Newspaper Archive of
Shelton Mason County Journal
Shelton, Washington
October 8, 2020     Shelton Mason County Journal
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October 8, 2020
 
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Three keys to ensuring the integrity of elections of elections and I am happy to report that Ma- son County is well positioned on all three keys. Well-run, safe elections depend upon good'people, good systems, and good processes. I’ll outline allthree. There are three keys to ensuring the integrity Good people. Mason County is blessed to have a tremendous staff of elections professionals who devote their efforts to ensure that every qualified voter gets . to vote and no one that isn’t qualified does. Fina Or- mond and Susie Blankenship are both certified by the Secretary of State as Election Administrators and our newest employee, Lorie Bickford is well on her way to qualifying. We also bring in temporary staff to assist at election time and we have several long-term people who make our elections happen. It’s a team of election ‘ professionals that are here to serve Mason County’s, voters. ' Good systems. We have the most modern, up-to-date . vote tally system there is in Mason County. It’s called ClearBallot from a company based in Boston. The sys- tem was originally designed as a system to audit the work of other vote tally systems. The people that built it quickly figured out that it was better than the sys- tems that it was auditing, so they changed it to make it a tally system. Like all Washington counties, we use VoteWA, the voter registration and election manage- ment system developed by the Secretary of State. It’s linked to the online voter registration system and the Department of Licensing to bring over registrations from driver’s licensing. VoteWA makes it possible for us to do same-day voter registration and ensure that people are not voting in more. than one county. Good processes. Elections people have plans and contingencies for most everything, so even though we had not specifically planned for how to conduct an election in a global pandemic, we still knew what to do.’ Beyond that, there are simple processes that we follow to ensure that ballots are protected and there is no opportunity for mischief. We never have one person alone with ballots. Drop boxes and storage for uncounted ballots are sealed with numbered seals and we keep logs to ensure chain of custody. Our tally sys- tem is not connected to the internet. Staff that checks signatures on the outer envelopes has training from the Washington State Patrol. The process of opening envelopes after signatures are verified ensures that the secrecy of the ballot is protected. ‘ Good people, good systems, and good processes taken together means that there is little chance of a problem. ' On top of that, we layer vigilance to ensure that every- thing is safe and secure. We don’t relax or let up, but remain vigilant so'that your vote is protected. Changes for this election residential elections are “showtime” for election officials. It’s our Super Bow1, it’s our Summer or Winter Olympics. Some things will be different this year, in part because of the global pandemic, but also because we have new resources. In the CARES Act, Congress appropriated $400 mil- lion for Covid preparedness in elections. Thanks to quick action by Governor Inslee and Secretary of State ' Wyman, Mason County received a check a couple of months ago for $169,510 as our share of that federal money. Here are some of the things that we are doing to prepare for an election that could be like none I have seen before. In looking at the issues that we may face, the Elections staff and I face some realities. Our office space, on the second floor of the County Administration building, is not conducive to social distancing. We wanted to get the foot traffic that elections generate away from the traffic for vehicle licensing and document recording. We also needed to be ready for the possibility that our office will not be open to the public in the fall. County facilities staff added a lobby area to’our first- floor ballot processing room with a new, separate en- trance, strictly for election customers. We need tobe able to allow people to register to vote or get a replace- ment ballot up to 8' pm on election day and for us to serve them. We alSo need to reduce the number of people in our bal- lot processing room, so we are adding new procedures and spacing staff out. ' We also added Video cameras to our ballot processing room so that people can observe what we are doing and achieve better transparency without having more people in the room during a pandemic. There is a live video feed of our ballot processing area, viewable from our website, masoncountyelections.us. The feed is available 24/7 while we are processing ballots. In addition to the CARES grant, I applied for and received a grant from the Center for Tech and Civil Life, that is paying for our outreach campaign, includ- ing this insert and mailer. Mark Zuckerberg and Amy Chan of Facebook donated $250 million to the CTCL'to be distributed to local election jurisdictions and Mason County was awarded $32,904.