by Janice Stewart
A few weeks ago, Bacon’s Rebellion writer Jim Sherlock recounted his positive experience with drive-up voting in Virginia Beach. Good deal, I thought. Jim and his wife had an easier voting experience, and he gave the election officials who assisted them high marks. What’s not to like?
Yesterday, I served as an election observer in a Richmond-area early voting location. In preparation, I completed a course in voting procedure. As I read the course material, I began to see ways in which drive-up voting did not conform with some basic precepts and safeguards of voting process.
Let’s look first at what happens when a voter enters a polling place and requests assistance in voting.
The request triggers the filling out of a two-part form. The voter states the assistance needed in the first part, and the person who provides the assistance (an official from the registrar’s office) fills out the second part, so that the person providing the assistance is known in the event of any discrepancy. There are strict rules about what the assisting person can/cannot do, and one of the forbidden things is to “handle the ballot” unless the person requiring assistance is physically unable to do it. Voters must perform as much of the process as they are able, including the feeding of the ballot into the ballot box/machine. The principle that once your ballot is handed to you, only you may handle it and see it until the vote is cast pervades every aspect of voting practice.
How is drive-up voting different? Nominally, a person must be age 65 or older and/or have a disability to request drive-up voting. In practice, anyone who drives up and asks to vote this way is served. So, it would seem that anyone who requests drive-up service is asking for assistance in voting. Yet no two-part form is required. I asked a number of officials at my voting location yesterday why this was the case, and no one had an answer. We don’t know who assists drive-in voters, even though that person performs many more parts of the voting process for them than in an inside voting situation.
The assisting person takes the drive-in voter’s ID, and brings it in to the office to get the voter checked in. The election official who does the check-in and produces the ballot never sees the voter. That is not the case with people who vote inside. In the inside check-in process, an election official asks a voter to state a name and address, looks at the person, then repeats the name. If the voter has presented a photo ID, election officials can compare their appearance with the photo. Such a direct visual connection is completely missing with drive-in voters.
Having watched a few hundred voter “check-ins” yesterday, I saw how important this step is in ensuring the integrity of the process. Lack of the visual connection creates an important gap.
Another precept repeatedly emphasized in the course material is that once the ballot is produced and handed to the voter, only the voter should see or handle the ballot from that point on. With inside voting, there are extremely limited instances in which a ballot and a voter can be separated (e.g. a spoiled ballot, or a voter’s physical inability to handle the ballot). Whenever such events occur, a senior official from the registrar’s office is involved, and the event is well-documented.
Drive-in voting throws that precept out the window. The assisting official brings a ballot outside to the waiting voter, who then completes the ballot, puts it in a folder, and hands it back to the assistant, who carries it back into the building. When you hand your ballot to the official from your parked car, you have given control of your ballot to another person. The official could easily open the folder and read your ballot. There is, to my knowledge, no record of who has handled your drive-in ballot or how long they held it before it was cast (assuming it was).
The question of when a ballot is “cast” is interesting. Legally, this happens when the ballot is put through the scanner, or through the slot into a ballot box, or in the case of a mailed absentee ballot, consigned to the U.S. Postal Service. When you turn your ballot over to the official in the parking lot, you assume that it is cast, but you don’t know that with 100% certainty.
Lastly, there is the observation of the voting process. Everything that goes on in the voting process, from the setting of the machine counters in the early morning to the reconciliation of the vote and closing of the polling place at the end of the day, is subject to observation by party observers. There are clear rules for how this is to be done. From my location inside the polling place, I was able to observe every aspect of the voting process, from the arrival of each voter, through check-in, the hand-off of the ballot, filling out the ballot, casting the vote by inserting the ballot into the machine, and leaving.
The observation process is not defined for drive-up voting. Where is the observer located relative to the car and the assisting official? Can the observer follow the official into the building to make sure that the check-in process is done correctly? Can the observer again follow the official back into the building to observe the ballot being cast? None of this is done easily. To be done well, the process would require an observer at each drive-up station.
From Jim’s comments about the Virginia Beach voting operation, and based on what I observed in my stint yesterday, I believe that the two voting operations we participated in were well-managed by impeccably honest people, and I cannot imagine that any voting irregularity occurred at these locations. In fact, I was impressed with and reassured by the rigor of the process, and the dedication of the people involved.
What worries me is that not all voting locations are run by impeccably honest people; and not all voters are honest. It would not require much ingenuity to come up with ways to corrupt the drive-up voting process by exploiting the openings left in the system under current rules.
At the very least, the drive-up process needs “tightening up.” This could be accomplished by having a full-up registration terminal and voting official at curbside, along with a ballot box that the voter could use to cast a ballot from his car. The current rules need to be revisited when the General Assembly next considers voting integrity.
Janice Stewart, a retiree living in the Richmond area, proof reads Bacon’s Rebellion posts.
