How Voting Works in Marion County, Oregon

[moonlady0623]

I found this to be reassuring!  

How voting works in Marion County
By Sheila Flanagan
from Salem Monthly, Section News
Posted on Tue Sep 30, 2008 at 10:53:51 PM PDT
You know the drill.  A few weeks before the election, Marion
County mails a ballot to your home.  Despite nine years of
Oregon's Vote By Mail system, it still feels strange to be
holding an official ballot in your own home.  How can you
trust your vote is going to be counted?

The answer is that Marion County goes to great lengths to
ensure that your ballot is accurately tallied.  Marion County
Clerk Bill Burgess explained the route a ballot takes from the
time you drop it off or mail it, until the results are
announced.

Marion County mails ballots 14 to 18 days before the election.
 As ballots are returned to the elections office, they are
checked to ensure that the secrecy envelopes holding the
ballots have been signed.  Sometimes there is no signature on
the envelope.  Time allowing, these ballots are mailed back to
the voters.  As Election Day nears, voters who have not signed
the ballot envelopes are called by telephone and advised to
come in and sign their ballots.

Next, ballot bar codes are scanned into the computer for a
signature check.  Marion County has the signature of every
registered voter on file in a computer bank.  Sometimes the
signature on file doesn't match the one on the ballot.  When
this happens the voter is contacted and asked to come into the
elections office to show identification and verify the
signature.

After the signature check, ballots are sorted by precinct. 
Volunteers hand-sort thousands of ballots by precinct number. 
The sorted ballots are numbered, placed on trays, and stored
in a secure location.

Five days prior to Election Day, volunteers working in teams
called  "boards" begin their work. Each board is
comprised of at least one registered Democrat and one
registered Republican.  The opening boards have three people. 
The first person verifies the precinct number on the
envelopes, separates the address labels from the return
envelopes, and passes the envelopes to person number two.  The
second person removes the ballots from the secrecy envelopes
and hands them to person number three.  

This person unfolds the ballots and places them, face down, in
groups of 25 ballots.

Following the opening boards, the ballots move on to the
pre-inspection boards.  These boards have the task of
inspecting all ballots, front and back, and separating out any
ballots with  questionable marks.  The machine readable
ballots are placed in a transport carrier to be tabulated. 
Those with questionable marks are altered so that the ballots
are readable.

If stray marks are making the ballot unreadable, the marks are
covered up with correction tape.  

Other times, the process of ink enhancing is used, in which
the board will mark the ballot so that the voter's intention
can more clearly be read by the machine.  Sometimes, a
duplicate copy of the ballot must be made so that the ballot
will be readable by the machine.

The ballots can't actually be run through Marion County's four
tally machines until election day.  The machines have optical
scan headers that look for marks between the arrows on the
ballots.  The machine tabulates these marks, thereby recording
the voting choices on each ballot.

The tally machines note the presence or absence of a line
between each of the arrows.  If an entire ballot is unmarked,
the ballot is unreadable, or votes have been made for more
than one candidate in a category, the ballot is kicked out by
the machine.

Fear not, however.  Those ballots will still be counted.  The
post-inspection boards inspect the unread ballots to determine
what action needs to be taken to make the ballot readable.  As
with the pre-inspection boards, sometimes ballots will need to
be enhanced so that the voter's choice can be clearly read by
the machine.

How accurate are the tally machines?  Four logic and accuracy
tests are run on the machines.  These tests ensure that the
ballots can be accurately read by the machines, as well as
ensuring that all ballots are being counted.

To those potential voters who don't vote because they feel
their vote won't matter, Burgess refers to the closeness of
many elections.

"When John F. Kennedy won the presidential election, the
margin of his win was less than one ballot per precinct,"
stated Burgess.  "A vote here and a vote there really
makes a difference.

"When you vote, you're making a statement that you belong
to this community and that you care about it.  Since you have
the choice, wouldn't you rather make it yourself, rather than
let your neighbor make the choice for you?" 

http://www.willamettelive.com/story/How_voting_works_in_Marion_County116.html

[renate]

1. I sure wish that every state had vote-by-mail

It's SO easy, there's a paper trail, you have time to research your decisions carefully and read up on unclearly worded ballot measures... it's wonderful.

This was a very interesting article--thank you!