My experience as a poll worker in Pennsylvania

I also came away from it thinking "Oh goodness it is amazing democracy survives, but kinda cool that it survives in an extremely participatory matter."

Edited: Would have been for the primary, not the general, so I was still in high school, and the youngest judge by 50 years or so for our polling place.

Likewise in regards to the police: we had DuPage sheriffs wander in occasionally to look around and chat - they were reasonably friendly with some random chitchat. I don't think they were looking for anything in particular, just trying to deter any mischief by being seen openly.

One thing that surprised me is how hard election judges worked: I started by 6:30 AM and only ended at 8:30 PM, with maybe a 15 min break for lunch. All the other time I was handing out ballots, doing paperwork, giving directions, etc. In DuPage election judges get $100 for the whole day - I would be in favor of doubling that plus some money for lunch + dinner.

That's it, you just don't get paid? I'd expect it to involve a criminal investigation.

The flag of the United States is not adulterated with text or anything else in place of its stripes, stars, and field.

Denver != Pennsylvania, obviously, but perhaps it's a federal law? I don't really know where the rule comes from.

Anyway, overall takeaways working were: 1. everyone was super friendly and it was a great experience and 2. Denver+Colorado really have their shit together when it comes to elections. It's easy to vote, there's a paper trail for everything, and the default is by mail. Everyone should do it like we do.

A tap on the shoulder and a polite comment seem well justified to me, and another poll worker agreed.

A simpler example might be a flag with 52 stars. It's blatantly political, even though it would likely be harder to notice than the hoodie I looked up.

https://www.pinterest.com/pin/119415827607659191/

(whether that's the exact same hoodie, who knows, but it matches the description close enough)

"Since Tuesday, she has become known as the “Topless Voter.”

The woman, who ripped off her T-shirt after objections that it was too political to wear inside the Exeter polls, said she has no regrets.

“I said, ‘Well then, can I vote naked?’ He turned to me and said, ‘If you want to.’ So I took off my shirt,” she said.

She said she kept on her mask because removing it would have been “unhealthy.”"

https://www.unionleader.com/news/politics/voters/topless-vot...

It seems similar to someone wearing clothing that contained text of the Pledge of Allegiance, the Constitution, or the Declaration of Independence. Yes, we know the right wing loves this stuff but I really don't think it rises to the level of 'electioneering'.

In fact, the guy was probably thinking 'Here's another lefty that hates the United States and the military'. It really does seem like there was some (unconscious?) bias at play here.

Once the ballot is in the box, disassociated from the voter then there is no more secrecy concerns.

CO has universal mailings. You mail (or drop off) your ballot in a double envelope, and only the outer envelope carries identifying information. One workstation examines the outer envelope to track who voted, and a different workstation processes the anonymous ballots. It requires a little more trust on the part of the voter, but also encourages more participation.

As a sibling comment mentions, states and cities have a great deal of freedom in terms of the "how" of voting and some do it better than others.

Voting is county by county, and it is run by human beings that make mistakes, but in the dozens of times I have voted the secrecy of my ballot has been entirely up to me. Party affiliation is not a secret, true, it is a public record. But the actual Please provide a lot more context than "how easy it can be" or please delete your post.

Maybe it's because we generally don't expect our votes to be revealed, nor do we expect serious repercussions if they were.

If things change so that either/both of those things stop being true, we'd probably see a push for better anonymity.

Obviously that's harder to do with mail ballots, because we have to be able to discern that one voter submitted one ballot. (and my state also allows people to track their mail-in ballot)

I was struck when the article said they were asking party affiliation before voting.

>> The voter approaches their table, and gives their name and party affiliation. The party affiliation is used as a signal that something fishy might be going on if the ratio of R to D is very different from the votes recorded.

Wtf? You can vote in secret but you gotta tell us who you voted with?

In the UK, everything is done on paper - even if there was potential for fraud, scaling it across the whole nation would take years and huge amounts of money (and even more hush money)

I've really not seen any issues inside my wheelhouse. I feel for the devs having to codify abberant voting procedures.

The process described in the article seems a little different than the ones we used in Texas (Dallas County). We have our registration verified and check in, and then are given a paper ballot. You put that into the voting machine, cast your ballot which is recorded electronically on the machine, then printed on the paper ballot and returned to you. You're told to inspect it for accuracy, then deposit it in a _separate_ tabulating machine, which scans it and displays what it recorded when reading your vote, tabulates your vote electronically, and stores the paper backup in a locked deposit box inside the machine. From my understanding, if anything goes wonky during this process and you notice it, you can have the ballot invalidated and receive another to cast. At the end of the day, the counts are printed and stored along with the memory cards on every machine, and those and the secure ballot boxes are all stored with tamper evident seals.

So you have the electronic count on the voting machine from the memory card, the printed count from the voting machine generated at the end of the day, the electronic count on the tabulating machine from its memory card, the printed count from the tabulating machine generated each day, as well as the paper ballots as a backup, which from my understanding are re-tabulated en-masse on larger and faster machines after the election to get a second count as part of the certification process. All data points have to match. None of the machines are connected to the internet, so you'd have to gain physical access to them or the memory cards, and anything done would have to match the counts on all the other associated machines and receipts, plus the paper ballot backups. The Secretary of State also generates a list of voters who cast ballots each day by county and voting location based on when you first check in to vote, so that's another publicly auditable list that would have to match that is not related to the voting machines themselves.

Paper ballots are definitely more simple and probably just as secure, if not more, if handled properly. However, having multiple points of redundancy is invaluable to help quickly identify issues and ensure everything matches over multiple steps of the process.

> The party affiliation is used as a signal that something fishy might be going on if the ratio of R to D is very different from the votes recorded.

Prior studies have only shown minor instances of voter fraud, I think something like 1000 documented instances of voter fraud amount 10s of millions of votes cast. With all the available information I have, I think it would be very difficult to fradulently product ballots on the order of 10s of thousands to actually swing an election.

Secondly, I think if we did have a widespread voter fraud problem I think it would also call into question past elections as well.

Some other possibilities might be that primary elections use a different process and/or undergo less scrutiny than general elections, or that procedures have changed since 2016.

As you said, it'd be an interesting exercise to go through exactly what DeMuro did and figure out whether what happened then would or would not work now.

Incidentally, it seems the author might have had to deal with a similar situation:

> The other event came when a discrepancy developed between the number of votes recorded by the machine and the number of voters tallied in the books: one vote was recorded in the books that was not recorded by the machines. We ultimately concluded that someone had just walked out of the polling place after they were handed their ballot, never casting their vote on the machine. Other possibilities which we ultimately ruled out were election board error, or that the voter voted in the wrong division after receiving their ballot. The redundant records — the index card, the registration book, the list of voters — helped to narrow down the possible causes. In the end, there was nothing we could do about it.

So there's an argument to be made that what DeMuro did (ringing up votes on the machine) could have been caught.

I’d much rather hear concrete allegations with evidence from someone who isn’t a lawyer for the losing party.

Assuming the person making these claims accurately relayed his observations, what he saw sounds just as likely to be workers setting up & testing the machines for proper functionality.

Of course, there's a chance that's not the case, and something else was going on. But lacking evidence to the contrary, this account seems explainable by something other than election fraud.

It is! Until you try to secure it. Then it isn't.

I would much prefer a seemingly archaic system that, at the cost of annoyances and delays, at least provides us with a reasonable sense of conviction that the results are accurate.

Insecure and hackable voting machines were already a problem more than a decade ago, and they're still a problem today.

1. Your physical signature witnessed by a poll worker, and your identity and presence physically recorded in several different locations.

2. A physical paper ballot only accessible by poll workers.

3. A locally stored electronic ballot only accessible by poll workers.

4. Multiple physical receipts with your votes, distributed to many different physical locations only accessible to poll workers.

5. A trained poll worker available to help at the time and place that you vote.

6. An easy backup plan if something goes wrong.

Online voting is optimized for the happy path, but handling all the edge cases where something could go wrong is extremely difficult to implement and difficult for voters to understand. With online voting you need to ensure the security of the voter's physical device, operating system, web browser, each link in their internet connection, and all of those for the voting servers as well. After implementing processes to secure all of that, you need to communicate the security in a way that an average voter can understand it. You also need to think about what to do when a voter needs help, or their computer crashes mid-vote, or their power goes out, or someone sends them the wrong link, etc. etc. etc.

Current processes are a little more complicated up front, but processes for preventing and correcting errors are easy to implement and understand.

The manual processes are much better for transparency and verifiability. And we really badly need those qualities right now, when you have to be able to prove to the other side that the vote was legit, and be able to prove that every claim otherwise is false.

I can picture several ways to do a hybrid (mail + online) election like getting a code in the mail, voting online, then being able to ensure your ballot was counted correctly by using your code.

It seems to make a lot more sense than having states count for a week.

It isn't. Bruce Schneier has written about how online voting is a terrible idea in general [0], and how real-world attempts at it are often woefully incompetent. [1][2] Voting should remain paper-based.

[0] https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2018/04/securing_elec...

[1] https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2019/12/election_mach...

[2] https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2020/02/voatz_interne...

With voting I think the consideration is a barrier for voting. In many states you do not need to prove it to vote. Some states allow a normal vote and some states make them provisional. Still, no concrete identification is required when voting in most states. The voter is trusted to be who they say they are under possible penalty. This only applies to in person voting. Almost all states allowing mail in voting do not require notarization.

With electronic voting you have a huge barrier in that not everyone has access to the means to vote electronically. You disenfranchise a pool of voters.

https://ballotpedia.org/Voter_identification_laws_by_state

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-pennsylvanias-vote-...

1. Mail in ballots were heavily partisan. The president made a point to instruct Republican voters to vote in person, and not by mail. And many other correlated factors (eg. COVID and social distancing has also been heavily politicized, influencing whether a voter would vote in person vs mail in).

2. Mail in ballots were delayed. This happened both legally (https://www.npr.org/2020/10/14/922202497/in-swing-states-law...), as well as though strategic dismantling of USPS mail processing facilities.

And now this pre-meditated orchestration, set up by a Republican president and Republican State house, is being used as evidence of some grand conspiracy. Its not, and has been predictable for months now, with countless news articles about it.

This had the exactly predicted result that Democrats voted by mail significantly more than Republicans, who were much more inclined to vote by person.

Many states report in-person voting very quickly, while mail in votes take more time to process. This, again, had the easily predicted outcome of increasingly the tally of votes for Democratic candidates by a significant margin over Republican mail votes.

A great example of this same phenomenon can be seen in states like Florida that are allowed to count such votes before election day. In those states, the predicted result of increased Democratic early/mail voting was fully born out by the results: Democrats lead the early available result, and as in-person votes on election day were tallied Republican votes significantly outpaced Democratic votes. Of course neither Republicans, or Democrats whose tallies suffered as more in-person results were processed, complained about this or alleged fraud, because again, it was the exactly predicted result

Another consideration is that, while polls weren't perfect, the overall result of the election is supported by the polls. Yes, in any individual state the polls may have been outside the margin of error, but as a whole, and in national polls, the results of the election follow the direction of the polls, and the national popular vote is generally within the margin of error on display in national polls. While still not perfect in this election cycle, pollsters did rethink their methods after 2016, taking steps like weighting education level in their models in accordance with the 2016 outcomes, so it is not surprising that, overall, the polls more closely mirrored the results of the 2020 election.

A final point with respect to the claim that Democrats are good at or routinely cheat in elections. The record of Democratic wins does not support this. If they were excellent at stealing elections, I would not expect them to have lost more than half of the presidential elections in the last 40 years. I would not expect them to occupy less than half of the state Governorships. I would not expect them to be in control of less than half of state legislatures. I would not expect them to lose very tight races in toss-up states. I would not expect election results in specific regions, counties, etc. to closely mirror party affiliation trends in voter registration.

I would expect massive conspiracies that would require thousands of people across the country to collaborate to be just about impossible to hide. I would expect more concrete evidence of voter fraud to appear than claims that typically disappear on close inspection. I would expect the bipartisan group of election officials, poll workers, etc. to include substantial numbers of people from opposing parties to have witnessed systematic irregularities instead of the rare vague suspicion.

In short, no available data has come to light to support any sort of widespread election fraud. Should any of the very small scale allegations being levelled by President Trump's campaign demonstrate concrete evidence, I fully support a rigorous investigation and legal proceeding to bring the incidents to light.

This is because many other states that were not swing states, "red" and "blue", simply aren't getting any attention. But the late counted mail votes in those states have followed the same pattern as PA. If you believe PA is somehow special in this phenomenon, you are wrong.

Finally, if you want to complain about your perception of a problem with late votes skewing things, the cause of that comes down to election laws in PA which prevent processing of such votes until election day, which was a law that PA sought to change so results would be known earlier, but they were blocked in this effort by GOP state legislature.