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I Signatures are the key to vote by mail
fashioned way of ink on paper every day. But that
old way of putting your mark in ink on an envelope
and returning it to the County Auditor is the key to
vote-by-mail.
It seems that there are fewer things to sign the old-
In a polling place election, a voter shows up on a Tues-
day in a school gym or library—my first time was at
the Masonic Temple in Juneau—tells the'poll worker
their name, verifies their address, signs the pollbook,
gets a ballot and finally...votes.
With vote-by-mail you don’t have to show up at a
school gym to get your ballot, my staff sends you one
and your signature is the way we verify that your bal-
lot came from you. '
When you register to vote, which for most people is
when you get your driver’s license, you sign on that
pad and the image of your signature gets saved with
your record and gets printed on your license. If you say
you want to register to vote, you swear an oath that
you are a citizen and the Department of Licensing then
transfers that information, including your signature
image, to my office. If you register on a card, we scan
and save the image of your signature oath with your
registration information.
When-you-vote, you put your ballot on the inside of an
envelope and sign on the outside and then return it to
us. My staff and I have been trained by the Washing-
ton State Patrol in signature verification and one of
them compares the signature on the outside of the en-
velope with the signature in your voter record. There
is no automated process, a trained election worker
checks every signature on every ballot envelope. If
they match, 'we know it’s you and will move your ballot
through the process to be counted. If it doesn’t match,
you get a letter and a phone call from my staff saying
that there is a problem.
The problems we see are almost always the same,
either an old voter registration where the voter’s signa-
ture has changed over time or has forgotten to sign. In
either case, we send out a form, ask the voter to sign
it updating their voter registration signature and then
save that with their voter record. If that matches, we
count the ballot.
People unfamiliar with vote-by-mail question its secu-
rity. To steal your ballot, I have to have access to your
mailbox, have the ability to replicate your signature
and rely on the fact that you don’t know or care that
there is an election going on. If I do manage to steal
your ballot out of your mailbox and forge your signa-
ture, when you call the elections 0fޢe and say that
you didn’t get your ballot, all of my work is worthless
because they will issue you a new ballot and cancel the I
one that I stole.
The best way to protect your ballot and your vote is to
stay informed and vote in' every election.
The mechanics of
VOte-By-Mail
Mason County is a jumble of districts. There are:
Congressional
3 County Commissioner
1 City
PUDs
12 Fire Districts
Hospital Districts
5 Ports
9 School Districts
43 Precincts
For some elections, we need as many as 125 different
combination of races, what we call ballot styles, to get
each voter exactly the right combination of districts
that they are entitled to vote in.
The process begins with the elections staff setting up
the election. The staff enters all of the races that will
be on the ballot by district into our computer system
and it designs the many ballot styles that we then send
‘ to our printer, along with the list of eligible voters.
Our printer, K&H, based in Everett, takes that infor-
mation and first prints ballots for our military and
overseas voters, since they go out first, then later for
the rest of our voters. You will notice a tiny barcode on
everything in your ballot packet, including the return
envelope, secrecy Sleeve, and even the ballot. K&H
uses that barcode to make certain that every voter gets
everything in their packet’and» exactly the right bal-
lot with exactly the right districts on that ballot. They
print the barcode on the ballot on the tab at the top
that you tear off before returning to us to ensure se-
crecy.
From K&H the ballots go to the USPS processing cent-
er in Tacoma, to be in your mailbox in a day or two.
You then vote and return the ballot either via mail or
in a drop box. ‘
For security purposes, we always have two people han-
dling ballots, whether picking them up at the Shelton
Post Office or emptying out our ten drop boxes. Drop
box ballots go straight into secured bags with num-
bered seals that we log to make certain that we can
establish chain of custody.
Once ballots arrive in our processing center, staff sorts
them into batches of fifty that are labeled and tracked. '
The return envelope. has a barcode that we use to find
the record in the voter registration 'system. A staff
member trained in signature verification by the State
Patrol scans the barcode to bring up the signature of _
the voter on the screen, which matches (or doeSn’t) the
signature on the envelope. If it matches, the envelopes
move on to be opened and separated, removing the bal-
lot. From this point forWard, everything is anonymous
and we cannot identify whose ballot is whose. ' i
A staff member then looks at each ballot to make
certain that the scanner will be able to read the mark.
Our system is very forgiving and can read almost any-
thing, but some ballot come to us torn or with coffee
stains so that we need to handle them separately.
Finally, staff feeds ballots into our scanner that counts
the votes for each race. After 8:00 pm election day, the
system totals the votes and we release results. That’s
the basics of setting up a vote-by—mail election.