A boost to ballot security

Published 9:00 pm Wednesday, August 9, 2006

Elections in Snohomish County are getting a security boost costing nearly a quarter-million dollars.

Improvements include computer upgrades and come as the county prepares to switch to all-mail voting in September.

The changes are partly required by state law. They were in the works before the County Council voted in January to switch to all-mail elections, county elections manager Carolyn Diepenbrock said.

The work is paid for by $240,000 in federal Help America Vote Act grants. The money is being spent to automate how ballots are sorted and tracked.

“Now that we’re in an all-mail environment, it’s even more important because we’ll have that many more pieces of paper to track,” Diepenbrock said.

The county is abandoning its system of sorting ballots by precinct, she said. Instead, ballots will be loaded and kept in trays as they arrive from the post office.

“We did everything manually,” she said. “We were constantly touching the ballots and adding and adding and adding to make sure we had everyone. It was extremely labor intensive and prone to error.”

A new high-speed scanner will better record thousands of ballots as they go through the counting process, she said.

Other systems are already used, including barcodes printed on the ballot envelopes. The new software tracks each ballot like shipping companies follow the path of parcels.

This spring, officials also began printing a random number in the upper corner of each ballot. That number is tracked in a separate database that proves the ballot is connected to the election, Diepenbrock said.

Ballots are still anonymous, she promised, because the random-number database is not connected to any specific voter information.

The new ballot tracking software also will improve security when the ballots travel from the Auditor’s Office across Pacific Avenue to the elections counting center, Diepenbrock said.

“This increases transparency and security at the same time,” Diepenbrock said. “We know where every envelope is supposed to be at any given time.”

State law requires reports that track ballots challenged for mismatched signatures or other errant marks.

The county found 224 ballots forgotten in a mail tray during the controversial 2004 gubernatorial election. Those ballots, found after the initial count, were later included in the results.

Those ballots should have been found under previous counting procedures, Diepenbrock said. The new system is expected to better track and report when ballots go missing as they did in 2004, she said.

In addition to computer upgrades, county tax dollars were spent to remodel of the Auditor’s Offices in the County Administration building.

As part of the $339,000 remodel for the auditor and human resources offices, two new ballot security rooms have been built.

Each room requires two employee key cards to enter, and alarms sound if someone lingers longer than 15 minutes, Diepenbrock said.

Reporter Jeff Switzer: 425-339-3452 or jswitzer@heraldnet.com.