With high early voting turnout this weekend, and thousands of mail-in ballots being sent in, with many voters deciding to bring their own ballots personally to the Registrar of Voters office on 9th street or at drop boxes at the two dozen early voting centers plus two other locations, new systems and procedures are being put to the test in Washoe County, a swing county in a swing state where in recent election cycles vote counting has gone slower than hoped for.
In terms of early voting, voters are using a new VREMS or Voter Registration and Election Management System, which centralizes voter data across the state, to ensure no one is double-voting and speed up any problems with signature verification, with digital poll pad check-ins.
A spokesman for the Washoe County Registrar of Voters George Guthrie recently gave our photographer Kia Rastar a tour of the county’s central ballot processing room where mail in ballots were going through the preparatory stages of being counted.
Guthrie said there are about 18 Registrar of Voters employees being helped by staff from other county departments.
"Every morning at 7 ish, 8 o'clock ish, we'll go to the post office … and we'll deliver those ballots here," Guthrie said of mail-in ballots.
These first go through a mail ballot sorter, as a digital check-in.
"It scans it and provides a picture of that envelope. From there, it'll then sort them into a variety of different pockets, precincts. And from there, we will take it out and then we have to signature verify it. So signature verifying, we're taking that signature on the outside of your envelope and we're comparing it to what you have on record. When you register to vote, you signed a paper and that's how we can verify that you are who you say you are when you sent in that mail ballot," he explained in detail.
The mail ballot sorter does have the software capability of doing automatic signature verification, but "it's a small minority that actually will pick up with that because most people's signatures are not pixel perfect. So then it has to go to a human, which the human will then do that signature verification. If it passes, then it will go on to batching where we're now, putting it in batches of 50, and those batches of 50 will stay together throughout the rest of the process."
Guthrie then showed the extraction process and machine for that. "We feed the ballots through. An operator essentially is just quickly removing the ballot from the envelope, separating them, then we'll do another count. From there, now that we've got the actual ballots outside the envelope, we've got actual votes," he said, next moving on to the scanners.
"Essentially, it's just scanning those results in. It's not counting anything yet. We're just getting those results. We're just getting those votes so that way they can be tallied and tabulated on election night," he said.
"There's a couple different steps in between, like what happens if the signature doesn't match up. Well, then we have to challenge it, and the voter needs to cure their signature or cure their ballot. Happens a couple different ways. They can call our office. They can come down," he said. "We've got a couple different things on the phone. They can go online. There's a lot of different options. They essentially have to prove to us that they are who they say they are when they send in this ballot because that signature didn't match."
Other stations for ballots in question are for what’s called duplication and adjudication.
"Let's say you have a ballot and you just absolutely dunked it in coffee, and it's ruined. It's soggy. It's really, not a viable ballot anymore, but you send it anyways… It's not gonna go through our scanners. It does have problems, but that's okay because we have this process called duplication,” he explained.
“We'll essentially take this ruined, whether it's coffee dunk[ed], maybe it's ripped or torn or just crumpled up, we’ll take that ballot, and we'll actually duplicate it into a fresh new ballot for you that is then workable in the scanners. We have a team that sits there, evaluates what you wanted to vote, and they both confirm, okay, this is what you wanted to vote for, and then they put it on a new ballot for you to be processed.”
Guthrie then went on to detail what happens in case of adjudication.
“Adjudication is where if you took that black pen and you filled it out for one candidate and then you went, oh, wait a second, I don't want that, and then you filled out another one, and then you go, oh, wait a second I didn't want that. Now you're crossing them out and you're trying, you're trying to say, No. No. No. I really, really wanted this person. You're pointing all these arrows to this box. Right? It happens. That is something that because when we scan them, it recognizes that there are marks in multiple ovals. And so then we have to bring it to adjudication where we'll have a team again, a bipartisan team where they have to sit there and go, okay, which one did they really wanna vote for?”
Guthrie said in all they might possibly be dealing with a quarter million ballots, which when not going through the process are safely kept.
“Washoe County's facility here is rather small. Again, everything happens in this one room. So when a mail [ballot] gets sent in, it is going to stay here. We even have our back section here, which we call the ballot cage. It's quite literally a a chain link fence with wires and locks. That is where all of our ballots get stored. And when they're not actively being processed, they're in there in storage.”
Guthrie said starting Monday the new phase will begin. “It started since the very first ballot that we got. We have to get them into the process. October 21st is when we can actually start opening those. But until then, we can still run them through this order. We can still get them signature verified. We can get them prepared as much as we can and get them as far along in the process. So that way, when election night comes on November 5th, we can then hit that button, get all those results out, and have everyone be happy.”
There’s also a map now with estimated wait times at all polling centers which can be found here: https://gis.washoecounty.us/agolHost?id=pwt
Early voting ends Friday November 1st. Election Day is November 5 with voting centers open from 7 A.M. to 7 P.M. while ballots sent through the mail using USPS must be received by 5 p.m. on the fourth day following the election and must be postmarked on or before Election Day to be counted.
Our Town Reno reporting and photos by Kia Rastar