Securing the vote: How officials safeguard your ballot

Fake phone calls, altered photos, and misleading posts on social media. There is a lot of confusing information floating around around elections. But election officials say the actual voting process is well protected. Gowri Ramachandran, the Director of Elections and Security at Brennan Center for Justice, joins me now to dive into it. Gowri, thanks for joining us this morning. Thanks for having me. All right, so let's get things started with this. Many voters worry that an electronic glitch, rather, or hack, could secretly flip the race that they voted on. How does a voter-verified paper ballot guarantee that software cannot secretly change the outcome? And what happens when those physical ballots are audited by hand? Thank you for that question. So one thing that voters should know is that about 98 percent of ballots that are cast in the United States are now cast using paper and all ballots in California are cast using paper. So what that means is. There's a paper record of your vote. You can check it before you cast it. So if you're filling out your ballot at home, you can check all the choices, confirm this is what you really wanted before you go and you drop it off at your election office or at a ballot drop box. If you're voting in person. At a vote center or at a polling location tomorrow on election day, you can check that paper and you should check that paper and make sure it accurately reflects your choices before it gets cast. That is the record of your vote in California and really across the country where almost everyone is using paper ballots. So what you're saying is you can actually go back in after the fact and make sure that your selections are the selections that you made. Absolutely. You can check that printed piece of paper. Then before you put it in the scanner or before you hand it off, you know, to the election official or the poll workers at your vote center, you can make sure it reflects your choices. And then that's the record that's used to audit the elections. So the best way to make sure. That people's votes were sort of counted as they intended, is to do what's called tabulation audits. And what happens when you do a tabulation audit is you compare a sample of the paper ballots to what the computer software is saying those votes represent. And you check, is it the same, right? And you do that for a sample, and if you do it for a big enough sample, you can confirm Confirm with a really high confidence that everything was above board. And the will of the people and the choices the voters made are what's actually being certified in that election. So Gary, there is widespread belief that voting tabulators are connected to the internet. Can you walk viewers through what actually happens with those machines? Yeah, so it is definitely not a best practice to connect those tabulators to the internet. And the way that they're used in California in particular and really all across the country Is that they are not connected to the internet. You might have internet connections in a voting location for something like the electronic poll books, right? Like the system that checks in, has this person voted already, have they not? But the actual tabulators that count the votes, they are not connected to the internet. The votes get scanned and then the information in the tabulator, so the counting that it's done is then transferred to the election officials. system, not over the internet, right, not by connecting to the internet, but by physically transferring those recorded votes over so that they can be, you know, added up as appropriate across all the different polling locations. So on election night, viewers often expect an immediate result, but full tallying those, fully tallying those mailing ballots can actually take several days. What should voters know about those multi-day counts? Yeah, I think what voters should know is that election officials are trying to make sure that the vote is accurate, right? They're not doing things like uploading stuff over the internet and sort of that sort of thing. Instead, they're taking their time. They're making sure when they receive mail ballots that a voter didn't already cast another mail ballot before, right? So they're making sure every eligible voter only gets to vote once. They are working with staff that have been working super, super hard, often for weeks to make early voting available to voters and then need to be working through the night to try to get the votes tabulated quickly. In L.A. County, for instance, there is a drug dog that is sniffing the packages of ballots to make sure that there's nothing in there that could be harmful to the workers. So there's a lot of steps they're going through to make sure that everything is accurate and safe for everybody. Interesting. We've seen some pretty sophisticated, deceptive measures here. AI-generated robocalls to fake notices claiming precincts are closed. Thank What telltale red flags should voters watch for, and how can they verify the real-time places and rules for casting their ballots? Mm-hmm. you Well, one thing to know is that as generative AI gets more very and more sophisticated and more and more sort of cheap and available to people, it gets harder and harder for an average person to just much. look at an image or listen to a piece of audio or look at a text message and say, hey, I can tell that this is fake. In years past, people would say things like, check to see if the person has extra fingers on their hand in that photo, and that'll be a clue that's AI generated. But nowadays, it's more rare for these deceptive tactics to be so sort of easy to spot. So the important thing for voters to do is check with their local election official website. That is where you can get. The most accurate and up-to-date information. I know you need to eat some water there. And if you need to drink a little bit of water, go ahead. A little bit. But I did want to ask you one more question before we go here. And what is the single strongest safeguard that should give every voter confidence that their vote will be counted accurately? I think the biggest safeguard is that all of this is done in a transparent manner. You have bipartisan monitors taking a look at both tabulation centers. And, uh, activity in the polling place. And so, you know, you can trust because it's all being done out in the open. Yeah. All right, Gary, uh, we're going to let you drink some water there. Uh, but thank you so much for your insight into this because you know, a lot of people need to be reassured about their vote considering what's been going on, uh, over the last several years. So we appreciate it. Director of elections and security at Brennan Center for justice. Thanks for joining us this morning. Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it.