While it's still fresh in my mind, I thought I'd share what it was like to work yesterday at our polling place and how election are conducted here in Ohio. This was not the first time I had done this but the first in a few years.
Ways people can vote:
1) Election Day at your designated precinct.
2) Pre-Election Day voting at the country Board of Elections. This spans about four weeks and the last day for this is the Sunday before Election Day at 5 PM.
3) Absentee. The first day you can request an absentee ballot is about four weeks prior to the election and the last day to request it is seven days before the election. Absentee ballots must be postmarked no later than the day before the election and received (via mail) not later than four days after the election for it to be counted. Also, the absentee ballot can be hand-returned to the county Board of Elections no later than 7:30 PM on Election Day but they can't be returned to a polling location.
Who can vote:
Must be a US citizen and resident of Ohio. All voters must be registered four weeks (plus one day?) before the election in order to vote on Election Day. All registered voters are loaded into each county's electronic poll book to be used on Election Day. I think there's some kind of cross-referencing system to insure no one is registered in more than one country.
The night before Election Day, the county database replicates to all electronic polling book terminals (they already had the registered voters loaded) so it's up to date on who has voted early and who has requested an absentee ballot.
How to vote:
For >95% of voters (my guess), an Ohio driver's license is used. The poll worker checks that the photo reasonably matches the person and then scans the QR code on the back of the license. This brings up the voter in the electronic poll book. The voter then has to verbally state their name (you can't read it off your license) and the address at which they are registered to vote which might be different than what's on the license. It has to match what's in the electronic poll book to proceed.
A driver's license is not the only form of photo ID accepted but the commonly used alternate is a passport. For anything other than a license, a manual lookup system is used where the poll worker inputs the voter's last name and the number portion of their address. The database brings up the options and the poll worker selects which is appropriate. From there, the procedure to verify name and address is the same as above.
As long as the poll book states the voter is eligible to vote, the voter then signs their name on the terminal screen (which is an iPad, basicaly) and the poll worker confirms that it matches the signature in the database (within reason). Once confirmed, the database declares which precinct's ballot should be given, Our polling location was for three precincts. Another worker gives the appropriate paper ballot to the terminal check-in worker. Each ballot has a detachable stub on the bottom and contains, most notably, a bar code which links that ballot to the voter. The bar code scan also prevents the voter from receiving a ballot from the wrong precinct.
At that point, the voter marks their ballot at one of about 20 or 25 stations with the usual fill in the circle method. After that, the voter goes to voting machine to feed their ballot into the voting scanner. Right before the scan, the voter detaches the identifying bar code stub so from that point forward, the ballot is no longer linked to the specific voter. The detached stubs are then collected in a sealed container. Our polling location had three voting machine scanners: you need that many to keep up during heavy times plus if one get's jammed, you still have others. If one does jam, there are emergency techician crews that can be called to come quickly and fix the machine.
The common voting eligibility rejection is from a voter requesting an absentee ballot and either not sending it in to the Board of Elections or thinking they can bring it to their voting location on Election Day. In those cases, a provisional ballot is provided for the voter which is sealed up in its own envelope, recorded, and then collected with others but certainly not scanned into one of the on-site voting machines. We had something like 25 provisional ballots out of around 1300. Those ballots are delivered to the BOE where a Democrat and Republican official jointly determine whether that ballot is legitimate (typically checking to verify it's a registered voter who hasn't voted by some other means).
When the election is over, a printout of the vote totals is extracted from each of the voting machines. One copy is placed on a window outside the polling location and the other is sealed up for delivery that evening to the county BOE. Importantly, the vote totals are recorded on redundant USB flash drives inside the machines and those are removed and sealed up for delivery, too. The location manager and location deputy (one each registered to each major party) jointly deliver the drives, printouts, and all other election materials to one of a few BOE collection teams around the county. Those USB drives are what's used to aggragate the vote totals across the whole county at the BOE HQ.
Voting location team:
Our crew consisted of 12 individuals and I *think* the makeup is six registered Democrats and six registered Republicans. When we're there doing our jobs, no one cares what party anyone else identifies with and I wasn't sure I knew for some of the crew anyway. Regardless, no poliitcal discussion is allowed throughout the whole time we're there.
Final thoughts:
We had a couple of polling location observers from the Democratic party that split time for the entire 14 or so hours. The one that was there for the afternoon and evening commented after the closing process that she felt it was a really organized, efficient, and, importantly, clean process the whole way through.
Lastly, I didn't write this out to waste your time or mine (I hope) but to give a flavor of what goes on in the election process, at least here in Ohio, for those that may not be familiar. I know every state does things differently but each time I've done this, this being my third but first in several years, I come away thinking Ohio has a really good and well thought out process for elections. If you have any questions, I'll try my best to answer.
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