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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.