Voting Stories (Shallow Thoughts)

Voting Stories

My hiking group includes several volunteer poll workers. After an election, sometimes you hear some fun stories.

The Case of the Missing Information

Like the absentee ballot that came in with all the outer envelope fields blank.

The outer envelope includes the voter's name, address and other identifying information, and a signature, so they can be checked off as having voted.

Poll workers verify the information, then pull out the inner envelope and add it, still sealed, to a pile of mail-in ballots to be counted. That way no one can ever see who voted for whom.

But if there's no identifying information on the ballot, they can't verify that it's from a registered voter, so the process stops there.

Fortunately, this ballot wasn't mailed in; it was brought in by the voter. So the poll worker showed the voter the blank fields: "Did you forget to fill out the information?" The voter was adamant: he'd filled it all out and distinctly remembered signing. But there his signature wasn't.

Then the voter remembered: "Oh, no — I was playing with my kids' invisible ink pen just before filling out the ballot. I must have used the wrong pen."

That was a new one! But no problem: they voided the ballot and had the voter fill out a new provisional ballot.

The mystery remains: was the actual ballot also filled out with invisible ink? We'll never know, because of the guards against anyone ever seeing both the voter's name and the actual ballot together.

The Case of the Similar Names

A woman came in to vote in person and was told she'd already voted. "I didn't!" she insisted. The poll worker looked up her name: it was marked as having voted, but the signature was an X. Suspicious.

Los Alamos County goes above and beyond when it comes to ensuring people's right to vote. One of the poll workers took up the investigation, which turned out to be something worthy of a TV mystery show.

The previous vote had been at the County building, which has cameras covering the entrance. So viewing the camera footage was the first step. A couple was seen entering and then leaving at about the right times. The poll-worker-cum-sleuth called some other workers over. Anyone recognize this couple? Someone recognized the woman (gotta love small towns!), but when they checked, that woman had voted in her own name. Anybody recognize the man with her? No.

So our sleuth tried social media stalking, checking out the woman voter's profiles. There were photos of the man who had been with her at the polls, and the sleuth eventually figured out his name — which was very similar to that of the women in whose name he had voted. They contacted him and asked if he'd signed with an X, and he admitted he had (he sheepishly said "I guess I probably shouldn't do that next time").

What apparently happened: when a poll worker checks you in, at least in New Mexico, they search on a computer through the list of names to find you. Then they click on your name, which opens a screen with your personal information (birth date, address, gender and so forth), where they verify it to make sure you're who you say you are.

But if a poll worker is sloppy and not following the procedure, they might do a quick verification of what's on the first screen, click on the name to get to the second screen but then not really pay attention to what they see there. And what if they happen to click on the wrong name — say the one above or one below the one they meant to click on? It's an easy slip with a mouse-based UI. If no one reads the second screen carefully, now you have someone voting in someone else's name.

The person who told me this story was angry about this. Not about clicking on the wrong name — anyone could make that mistake — but about not checking the second screen. "If this had been one of my poll workers ... they wouldn't be working at the computer any more." Most poll workers take accuracy very seriously; rules like "always verify the information on the second screen" are there for a good reason, and help protect everyone's voting rights. So the Los Alamos County poll worker crew is going to be a lot more careful about training new poll workers in the future, to make sure the rules are followed.

On the other hand, the good news is that there was no malice involved here on the part of any voter. It was clearly a poll worker error. No one was trying to impersonate anyone or vote improperly. The other good news: Los Alamos County goes above and beyond when it comes to ensuring people's right to vote!