It took ~20 of us 5 hours to process ~2000 mail in votes yesterday in my village, and we were cruising along. Keep that in mind when you see that a big city has millions of them. Also, these people are largely volunteers, and often older, and everyone needs to sleep. https://twitter.com/PeteButtigieg/status/1324004715575844865

As I said to my fellow election inspectors we can’t make the process faster, but we can make it slower, especially if we try to hurry it.

I was also running the scanner, which is a temperamental piece of 1990s tech.

Every ballot that comes back and cannot be read by the scanner takes 2 or 3 people to interpret and process. In most cases it’s absolutely clear what the voter’s intent is, at least if you aren’t a lying bastard. Then the ballot is recreated and checked again.

Those little circles are serious problems for people with disabilities, bad eyesight, and anything but the finest in fine motor skills.

Some people circled their choices. Some used Xs. Regardless, one ballot in 100 required a full stoppage while it got sorted.

The process cannot be parallelized in a meaningful way because of the accountability needed. In tech terms the process is full of fsync().

Anytime there’s extra stuff in an envelope, or the person opening the envelope accidentally slices the ballot, or any one of a ton of different problems things grind to a halt.

I cannot even imagine having to deal with postmarks, too.

Even the number of folds in the ballot impacts the scanning rate. The team I was in figured out that if we dedicated someone to straightening the top two folds we could scan much faster.

The number of folds was determined by the budget for the election. Fewer folds means bigger envelopes means more postage. There are limits there.

Because of COVID concerns and governor mandates we couldn’t have more people helping. It also wasn’t feasible for me to cross-train the person scanning on the next shift with what I’d learned on ours. So they had to endure the same learning curve we did.

My team could process and scan 50 ballots in 10 minutes or so. If everything went well it was 7. If not, 12. Every batch of 50 would empty the pipeline, be recorded, and batched together.

Then we’d have to restart the pipeline, with people opening the envelopes, people removing the ballots, people straightening the ballots, and people scanning.

It was a great experience, and I love that there was 85%ish voter turnout. But we have got to figure out a better & secure way to do this, and do it consistently across the country while respecting states’ rights.

Federal highway funding mandates certain things like speed limits. Perhaps federal postage funding grants for mail in ballots would help drive some standardization as well.

Similarly, there has got to be some way to cut paper out of the critical path for voting in person, using technology and standards to drive up trust in the electronic voting hardware and software.

It’s worth noting that none of the computer systems we used for the election were ever attached to a network. I like that.

There also were “express” voting machines that were computerized and designed for disabled folks. They’re expensive, though, but it starts to show that this can be done. Imagine if the $100m that was wasted trying to unseat McConnell was applied to these problems instead!

So if you’ve read this far I thank you. I ask that you help push us, as a country, forward towards better options here, more standards, and more respect and understanding for what drives others to make the decisions they do. Don’t gripe on Twitter, tell your legislators!

Let’s not wait until 2023 to get on these things. COVID is a permanent reality and I hope 85% voter turnout is, too. Let’s get this stuff fixed.

Other questions people are asking: my little village of ~8000 had ~4800 mail in ballots. There were three shifts of people handling them.

Just like in other security contexts there is separation of duties. It’s not extremely rigid but there are enough eyes that anything untoward would be seen by 20ish people.

There were observers in the room at times but they were to stay in their area and were not allowed to interact with us. Some had very strange questions, “gotcha” style, mostly thwarted by the realization that disabled people had several options for voting on their own.

We were briefed on what to do in an emergency. My job was to take the entire scanner with me as best as possible and meet across the street. Note the scanner was locked in a cart so that would have been non-trivial, but I’d probably get help from the police in the building.

I saw completed ballots but they don’t have names on them. The stage before me was where it would have been possible to see names from envelopes and voting preferences, but being nosy is slow and many of the envelopes were printed in random directions so it was harder.

We did not enquire about whether the directionality was intentional or in error. The next stop for the envelopes did want the openings all in the same direction though.

Processes vary between voting precincts. I think our village clerks met the problems of an election with the right level of automation and effort for the size of the task. I cannot speak to other places, though, and generalizing beyond my experience is dangerous.

There were accountability steps prior to us receiving the ballots. The ballots had to be checked in, and names were read aloud somewhere. I was not present for that.

Some folks had alphabetized all 4800 mail in ballots. My heart goes out to them, they are the unsung heroes of our effort, making it so the voter verification could happen more quickly.

In bigger cities that sort of process is impractical, of course.