Here’s how Utah’s ballots make it from your table to tabulation

OGDEN — As of Halloween Day, more than 600,000 Utahns had cast their ballots for the November 5 election, the vast majority of them via mail or drop box.

KSL TV visited the Weber County vote center to see the steps and the security features of how a ballot moves from the kitchen table to being tabulated.

“We pay attention to every detail at every step,” said Weber County Clerk Ricky Hatch.

Ballot security starts before a ballot even gets to a voter’s house. Utah maintains a voter database known as the voter rolls, which are updated daily as voters move, die, or change their addresses.

There are currently almost 1.8 million active registered voters in Utah.

“The term universal mail balloting just doesn’t apply in Utah because we don’t mail it out universally,” Hatch said.

Ballots are only mailed to active registered voters. Inactive voters are those who haven’t voted in two consecutive federal elections.

“(Active voters are) just specific voters, who have proven to us that they live where they say they live and they are who they say they are,” he said.

A series of steps with security features along the way

Once a ballot gets put into a drop box, poll workers pick up those ballots and return them to the clerk’s office. Poll workers must go in teams of two, the bags are logged, sealed with zip ties to notify officials if they’ve been tampered with.

Each county will have slightly different processes, but the ballots are also tracked — via GPS in Weber County.

Once safely inside, poll workers remove privacy tabs from the envelope that expose the voter’s signature.

An Agilis voting machine sorts the ballots into batches and does a first pass verifying those signatures. If it can’t read a signature, it kicks it out for teams of poll workers to review. The signatures get reviewed a total of three times before they’re placed into what’s called a cure list so voters can be contacted. Signature audits are also done to check for the accuracy of the verification.

Then, a machine will open the ballots, with a poll worker separating the ballot from the envelope.

The envelope is the main part of the ballot that has identifying voter information on it. The ballot itself only has a precinct number.

Once the ballot is separated from the envelope, it would be challenging to tell which voter belonged to that ballot. The ballot envelope also comes with a 9-digit code unique to the voter and the election. So, even if multiple ballots got sent to a house for a single voter, only one could be voted.

There are also markings on the ballot preventing voters from casting a ballot by mail and in person.

The ballot is prepped and scanned

After being sorted and logged in batches, a ballot is flattened and then sent to a scanner. The scanner takes a digital image of the front and back of the ballot.

“Then it stores that in basically a line in a spreadsheet or a line in a file that says, ‘here’s this ballot, here’s the precinct. And then here’s how they voted for each of the races,'” Hatch said. That record is known as the Cast Vote Record.

Each night, those votes cast are fed into a locked-up computer using an encrypted flash drive. According to Hatch, those flash drives are made in the US, and each one gets wiped clean, logged, and stored under lock and key after each use.

The tabulation room is also under lock and key, and the machine’s hardware and software are audited with a type of digital fingerprint that detects any irregularities.

“This (tabulation computer) is not connected to anything. Not any county network, any internet, any bluetooth, anything. It is also audited,” Hatch said.

When polls close on election night, the results are populated with the click of a button.

“You click print and it comes up and that’s that’s that it,” Hatch said.

What if the sorting machine can’t tell who you voted for?

The process for determining a voter’s intent is known as adjudication. For any ballot the machine can’t scan, it’s reviewed by a team of poll workers. Two workers discuss the markings and whether they can clearly tell a voters intent. In Weber County, a third person is logging their conversation.

“If the team approved it or changed it (we know) who the team was. And we have supervisors as well in this process. Overall, this is a critical part. This is one area where election worker actually can change the voters vote,” Hatch said.

The race that needs adjudication is sectioned out, so workers can’t see the votes of other races. Poll workers are also given training.

Ballot processing is a detailed process with several steps, but one county clerks say has many checks in place.

“Every election official — we care just as much about your vote counting as you do,” Hatch said.

Non-English speakers have options for voting, county clerk says