Protecting Local Elections from Fraud

How can you rig a local election? If you’re of my parents’ generation, you might pretend to be a dead person and vote, or spend your free time as a Chicago Democrat filling in empty ballots. I always think of the scene from Gangs of New York, where Leonardo DiCaprio bribes and bullies Irish immigrants fresh off the boat to vote for Tammnany Hall. But local officials work on making those old ways impossible in 2020.

“I don’t think anybody who’s an election official signed up to be an IT person,” says Nick Lima, Cranston director of elections. “But that’s essentially what we’ve become.” Lima argues that when it comes to elections protection and information technology, your security is only as strong as your weakest link. He petitioned the state office to set aside money from the federal government to upgrade computer systems and other older equipment. He’s looking ahead to upgrade the backend infrastructure.

For mail balloting, security starts with the application. A local board of canvassers uses signature verification for mail ballots, and two members of the board sign a certification sheet. After their signature is verified, the voter receives a mail ballot application. Then the Secretary of State mails out the ballot to the voter.

The voter gets the ballot and signs, seals and mails it back or drops it in a drop box. Bipartisan pairs from the board of elections make sure the signature on the envelope matches the prior signature on the application. Assuming it matches, the old envelope and the ballot are separated; the ballot will be counted by a high speed counting machine, and no one can tell who voted for whom.

Early voting is a new process this year. It’s essentially the same as showing up at election day. A voter shows up to a location for early voting with a photo ID, and election officials verify the photo and the name. They are checked into an electronic pollbook, and it’s updated automatically. If they’ve requested a mail ballot, they are unable to be checked in on the poll pad.

For people who vote on election day, a voter scans their ballot into a counting machine that tabulates votes internally. It is not networked until the results are transmitted to the state board of elections.

A risk limiting audit is another layer of security that uses statistics to estimate the certainty of the election results. “Starting this year, we’re one of the first states in the country to implement this statewide,” says Lima. “We just had one for the Presidential primary; we’re gonna have one again for the election in November.  

“Whereas in the past, a recount was the only way to verify whether the machine was tabulating the votes correctly, now we have these audits where we’re hand counting sections or fractions of a percentage of the ballots cast in an election to verify with 99.98% certainty that the election result is correct.” If a foreign power or a bug in a machine tinkered with results, the audit would catch the error.