For the last 19 years I have been allowed to go behind the curtain of what we do in this country and state to pull together elections.  For 14 years I was appointed by my political party as a Board of Elections Observer (or back when we started it was called Challenger) in many types of elections in about 14 Ohio Counties, mostly my own, Lucas for the Ohio Democratic Party and various county parties.  And for the last 5 years I have been one of the four members of the Board of Elections.  

I can tell you have seen the whole process now and gone through every training our board offers it’s employees and all of the ones the Ohio Secretary of State’s office and the bipartisan Ohio Association of Elections officials have to offer.  So I now know more than most humans about how our elections work in Ohio.  

And I can tell you that even by the end of next week, December 1, 2023, we won’t be done with all we do to keep elections accurate and secure for the November 7, 2023 General Election and we are already working on the March 19, 2024 Primary Election.   

Like many, I used to think that the numbers you see on Election Night were the official count.  They are not.  There are literally weeks of checks and cross checks that go into our elections after election night.  Since a certain presidential candidate and his supporters don’t want to believe he didn’t get the most votes in either General Election he was in, they have created this idea of how the election was stolen from him.  Let me tell you that it truly would have been easier in 1969 to 1972 to have faked the moon landings of the Apollo program.  Then again, some of the folks who buy the “Big Steal” also believe that we could create special effects decades before that was possible.  

So, let me tell you about the procedures on Election Night and after to get us to the final answer and prevent any kind of major games being played.  First, understand in Ohio, and in my county, every ballot is a paper ballot.  Whether you are voting by absentee ballot, or a fill in the ovals paper ballot when you vote in person, a provisional ballot, or cast your vote on a touch screen, you are voting on paper.  

Our touchscreen voting machines are ballot marking devices.  Think of them as the world’s most expensive and tested Number Two Pencil’s.  They are given a bar code that tells the machine what ballot to give you.  BTW, there is no one ballot in an election, save the Special Election of August of 2023.  Because of the various lines for different council, state house, state senate, US Congressional, Library, Fire, School, etc district in our county, we have to create dozens to about 1,300 different ballots for those who vote.  You then vote and it records each of those votes in writing.  You then take the ballot to a scanner where it gets scanned and stored.  

Each piece of equipment was checked by a team of at least one Democrat and one Republican and done in a public forum.  Every time we decide if a voter’s registration should be done, or a ballot is issued, it’s done with bipartisan teams. Every time we move a ballot, whether the original electronic copy or the paper original, it’s done with bipartisan teams and tamper resistant evidence seals and at some points also delivered under the watchful eye of a bipartisan team and law enforcement.  And all along the way, they those seals and evidence protocols are checked and rechecked by a bipartisan team.  If we have ballots or counting equipment in a room at our office, you can not get in there without a Democrat and a Republican swiping an electronic key.  And we don’t leave ballots lying around without a bipartisan team watching.  This last Election Night, our Deputy Director, a good guy and yes a Republican, had to go up a floor and walk almost the length of a very large building to get me.  They needed me to come down to the count room, so that at least one Democrat was in with the people doing the counting.  Normally our Democratic IT worker would be in there helping, but his wife went into labor that morning.  And our Director, a Democrat, needed to step out and do something but couldn’t until I relieved her.  I can tell you would trust our GOP employees in that room with my life, but we don’t with a ballot.  

Now, there are tales of copied ballots and foreign powers dropping them off on the shores of our country.  Let me tell you I can not tell you, nor have I ever been briefed, as to all of the safeguards on the our ballots, but they are standard ones.  The paper is unique, so is the ink.  There are specific marks we need to identify the ballot.  And there are usually multiple sets.  One to identify it not only as our ballot from my county, but pretty close to being able to tell it’s your ballot.  There are also ones to feed it through our count machines.  They have to align perfectly, keep reading for what happens.  And a bipartisan team checks them on the way out and in to make sure they’re legit.  

Now, not anyone can print a ballot.  We have specific companies we can work with.  We have our own in house shop certified to do that too, but because of sheer numbers, we sometimes get help with part of the process.  Due to a situation too complicated for this post, on one race, in one village, we had to have a special paper ballot. We hired one of those certified printers to help us get that one created.  They made a tiny printing error, measured somewhere between 1/32nd to 1/64th of inch.  And we had to remake all of those ballots. 

When I say remake, bipartisan teams sit down.  The one has a new copy of the ballot, the other the original.  Both get a serial number that has to match, but has another color so we know which is the original with issues and which is the remake.  And we cross check each other and each ballot. So, when you think about that idea of supposedly printed ballots to stuff in ballot boxes, think of this issue and how they would need to get the printing done perfectly, never mind all of the other safeguards.  

Now what we get you on Election Night is called the unofficial tally.  Over the next several days other ballots will come in that may or may not count.  For instance, any absentee ballot that was post marked the day before the election and gets to us in the timeframe, will so long as all of the security items jibe count. But again on each one, a Democrat and Republican have to agree or send it to us the board.  The Board is 2 of each party, and unless we can get to a 3-1 or 4-0 vote, they’re not getting counted.  

Also, there are some people who have an issue on Election Day.  They requested an absentee ballot, but say they didn’t get it.  They forgot to bring the required ID, etc.  So, what we do is let them vote a provisional ballot.  This is a special paper ballot.  It gets put into a security envelope.  If you fix the issue you had, e.g. you bring in the ID to us afterwards, then a bipartisan team checks to make sure all of the I’s are dotted and the T’s crossed.  There some mistakes we as the board can forgive, e.g. you put down your date of birth as the correct month and day, but made the year the date of the election.  Those we can forgive.  But there are ones we can’t.  But again, we need a bipartisan vote of the board to count those.  And we don’t get to see how you voted before we decide if those will count or not. 

The staff will then open those in bipartisan teams and deal with any issues, e.g. people have some really different ways of marking a ballot.  So sometimes they have to bring them to us, and we have to again vote 3-1 or 4-0 to figure out your intent. And then they remake those ballots too to make them scan properly.  

At that point, we get the final, official results.  That is unless any race is within 0.01% in which case, we do a recount.  Don’t think your vote matters.  We have, in my five years as a board member, not once but twice had to flip a coin.  We had an even tie.  One race was a district that crosses three counties.  But again, they were tied.  And we have to declare a winner before we do a recount.  So, we actually flipped a coin to decide the winner.  And then do the recount.  I am happy to say we managed to get a coin thanks to our Deputy Director, from the year our county was founded, but we really do toss a coin.  So, last time, with the Toledo Blade filming it, I flipped it after one of my Republican colleagues decided which one was heads and which tails.  I can tell you the recount on both of these races was yet again a tie, in which case the coin flip is what decided the elected official.  Now a recount is a manual hand count and recheck of every ballot in select polling places with not one but two bipartisan teams double checking their work.  It’s rare it changes an outcome, but it does sway a few votes here and there.  

But if you think we’re done, then, if not a single race is tight enough for a recount, or we did the recount, you would be wrong.  You see we do this thing called a risk limiting audit.  If you want to see a dorky proceeding, come to our certification meeting of an election, they are public.  We will receive marching orders from our boss, the Ohio Secretary of State as to what we have to do.  Usually we get told one or two statewide races and a number of contested local races, and we pick the later, by drawing names of offices out of a box or hat.  Again, alternating Democrat and Republican.  We then put every polling place in the county, with what precincts are on it, and how many votes.  And we once again randomly draw polling places until we get to 5% or more of the total vote.  We draw one more polling place as a backup.  

And then bipartisan teams do a recount of those races in those polling places.  And we don’t accept an accuracy rate of less than 99.99%.  And we do that every time.  

So, again, when you hear about any claim of an election being stolen, imagine convincing Democrats and Republicans to work together, against the interests of one of their candidates, and get past those kind of safeguards (and those aren’t even close to all of them) and stealing or adding millions of votes around the country.  It would have been easier to fake the Moon Landings and keep that secret for 50 years.  BTW, in case you buy that conspiracy theory, three of the Apollo Moon Landings left laser reflector mirrors on the Moon.  Got a high powered laser and the instruments to measure a small amount of light bouncing back? You too can hit one and have your signal bounced back.  They have done it around the world many times, and even did it on the Big Bang Theory TV Show.  To quote an old joke, we were going to fake them, but we hired Stanley Kurbick to direct the show, and he wanted it to be so accurate, it was cheaper to actually do it.  

So, please, vote, and do not buy the rants of people who lost an election.  The Democracy you save will be your own.