Auditor Explains the “A Team” and Ballot Processing

— from F. Milene Henley, Auditor —

The sixth in a series of articles about elections in Washington State by San Juan County Auditor F. Milene Henley. The County Auditor administers elections and voter registration in the County.  (View first article HERE. View second article HERE. View third article HERE. View fourth article HERE. View fifth article HERE.)

If you’ve visited the Elections office around Election Day, you may have seen a group of people sitting around the table in the back room. There may have been cookies or candy on the table, and there were likely cups of coffee or tea around.

It might look like a coffee klatch, but it’s not. This is a dedicated group of semi-volunteers (they are paid, but very little) who seasonally assist in the Elections Office. Technically, their title is Elections Workers. We call them the “A Team.”

Most counties hire extra workers during elections; King County hires, literally, hundreds. In San Juan County, we keep a pool of about 10 workers on the roster, and call in from 2 to 8 at a time, depending on the election and the availability of internal staff.

Their role is to help with ballot processing. Ballot processing starts, of course, with regular staff. A key requirement of ballot processing is working in pairs. From the first step – which is picking up the ballot envelopes – ballots are never handled by one person alone. That means you may occasionally find the Elections door locked during election periods, with a “back in 10 minutes” sign on the door, while both staff members go to the post office or the ballot box to pick up ballots.

The next step is to put the ballots in batches of around 50 (both staff members count the number in each batch), and assign numbers to each batch. Each batch gets a tracking sheet, which will stay with it throughout the processing cycle.

Signature verification follows. Staff work individually while verifying signatures, but to ensure that no ballots go missing, they count each other’s batches before and after verification.

That’s when the A Team comes in. On scheduled ballot processing days, they will show up, coffee cups in hand and a fiery dedication in play. They are assigned to work in pairs, matching, to the extent possible, Republican-leaning team members with Democratic-leaning team members. Their first task is to separate the security sleeves from ballot envelopes, and then the ballots from the security sleeves. The envelopes and sleeves are bundled by batch, labeled and stored.

The ballots themselves are then manually inspected by the A Team. The team looks for stray marks, ballots filled in by pencil, damaged paper, or anything else which could cause a mis-reading by the scanner. Ballots which may be mis-read are set aside for manual resolution or duplication; those with unclear intent are removed for the Canvassing Board to review. At each step, the ballots are counted by each team member, and any removals are documented on the batch tracking sheet.

If a ballot must be duplicated in order to be successfully read by the software, it is done so by two people: One reads the responses while the other records them on a fresh ballot. Then they reverse positions, and verify that the recorded responses are accurate.

After inspection, elections staff give the ballots one more quick review before scanning them into the ballot software. At the end of the day, the A Team, under the direction of elections staff, as a group “resolves” ballots singled out by the ballot software as questionable, including “overvotes,” “undervotes,” and write-ins, as well as any race in which the marking is not legible by the computer. If the A Team does not agree on the disposition of any race or mark, the ballot is set aside to go to the Canvassing Board for review. I’ll talk more about overvotes, undervotes, and write-ins next month.

A Team members are invaluable during the election cycle. Their work is repetitive, tedious, and critical, a vital part in ensuring that democracy keeps working. If this is something you might like to help with, give us a call at 378-3357, and we’ll keep your name on file for the next time we’re recruiting.