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Elections and security officials outlined safeguards in place to protect Delaware County elections.

Delaware County Elections Director Jim Allen, Chief Registrations Clerk Crystal Winterbottom and cybersecurity expert Kevin Skoglund, executive director of Citizens for Better Elections, presented protections already in place during a Hot Topic forum Friday hosted by the League of Women Voters of Central Delaware County entitled, “Delaware County Elections: Are they Free, Fair and Secure?”

Among the issues addressed were the voting process itself, mailed ballots and the chain of custody in the election process for the county’s 410,000 registered voters.

“Today’s program is about informing our communities to advocate for good governance and to support free, fair and secure elections,” Anne Mosakowski, president of the League, said.

The event was moderated by Delaware County Daily Times guest columnist Jodine Mayberry, who also serves as chair of the League’s Legislative Advocacy Committee.

Skoglund said Hart Verity 2.3.4 voting machine that Delaware County picked to replace the Danaher voting system is a good machine. He said the Danaher machines were digital recording electronic machines, meaning they didn’t have a paper record of every vote.

“We’ve come to realize it’s really important to have … evidence-based elections where the voters vote is memorialized on paper so then you have it to go back and recount it or audit it,” he said.

Allen added that the Hart machines were chosen because of the safety mechanisms they have.

“One of the reasons Delaware County favored Hart over the other manufacturers is that they have specific safety features, most notably … (that) a voter or the poll workers can’t refeed through a ballot that’s already been read on that scanner,” he said. “That prevents any kind of ballot box stuffing.”

In addition, each one of the scanners captures a picture of each ballot, allowing officials to later be able to determine the voter’s intent if such a case is needed.

Talking about mail-in and absentee ballots, Allen explained that these require verification of identification either a PennDOT-issued license or the last four digits of a Social Security number. Without this verification, he explained, a mail-in or absentee ballot cannot be processed.

The ballot itself, he said, is mailed in a nonforwardable format, so it can only be sent to the address the voter put on their application. And although voters may receive more than one mail-in ballot application, Allen explained that only one ballot is processed per voter that corresponds to their unique voter identification number.

The elections director also explained the process the ballots go through Election Night.

“The first safeguard that happens is when the polls close, the poll workers run a tape,” Allen said. “They shut down the ballot scanner and they run the poll tape that shows how many ballots were cast and then the results of every contest that applies to that precinct.”

Then, he said that is recorded in a V-drive in that scanner.

“The key part of the chain of custody … (is) that on the ballot bag, there is a seal that’s placed by the poll workers on the gray ballot bag before it leaves the polling place,” Allen said. “When it’s transported to Media and then that ballot bag is re-transported to the central count, that ballot bag has on the return sheet … that seal number that was applied to that ballot bag.”

In addition, the V-drives are sealed in a tamper-resistant Tyvek envelope and then both the judge of elections and the minority inspector sign across the seal on the envelope, Allen said.

“If there were any tampering that were to occur with those V-drives, we would know the second they came into Media or when they were transported again to the central county,” he said. “It’s a material … you can’t tear it with your hands, you have to use some kind of cutting device. It would be very evident.”

They also addressed the issue of hand counting.

“There’s been a lot of talk about this,” Skoglund said. “Hand counting is slow. It’s expensive and it’s inaccurate.”

He said on average, it takes 7 seconds per contest per ballot to be hand counted. So, for example, with 500,000 ballots that have 10 contests each on them, if there were 500 teams of people with three workers each, it would take 19.5 hours for them to count all those ballots, he said.

“And you have to have a space to hold those 1,500 people and 500,000 ballots for three days as well,” Skoglund said. “It’s a huge logistical undertaking to be able to do that.”

Allen noted that the poll workers already work a 13-hour day and to add such an undertaking after that would be “a train wreck.”

Besides, he said, hand counts interrupt the chain of custody.

“You’re now rehandling between multiple people the ballots that would otherwise be sealed up and returned,” Allen said.

Skoglund gave the example of Butler County who picked three precincts with 1,600 ballots to hand count.

“They took 18 and a half hours to count them all and they made two errors in the process,” he said. “The scanners had counted those ballots during the election … made no errors, no extra time, no extra cost.”

Of the machines, he added, “There’s no reason to believe that the machines aren’t doing their job correctly because we are double-checking them. Now, we have all these systems … from the poll tape to the V-drive … You have all these things that are there that are telling us that the machines are doing their jobs correctly.”

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