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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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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 0ffi¢e 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.