Protecting Ballots, Voting Machines A Top Priority For South Bay Election Officials
SAN JOSE (KPIX 5) -- Santa Clara County is working on plans to keep ballots and voting machines safe from tampering on election day.
Early voting is in full swing at the Santa Clara county registrar of voters, and the ballots are piling in.
We wanted to see how the voter system is safeguarded.
"The entire building right now is a secure facility because we are counting ballots. S, I can't let you go back there without a badge," Registrar of Voters Spokesman Phillip Chantri said.
All uncounted ballots are first put into trays and racks and locked behind a sliding steel partition. When they're ready to be counted, workers feed them into a machine that scans them and sorts them by precinct. A high speed camera captures each signature.
"Every single ballot that comes into this office is signature checked against your voter registration files," Chantri said.
Next, workers flatten the ballots by hand to prepare them for a smooth entry into the actual vote counting machines.
"This is the ballot counting room, we actually don't let anyone into this room unless they have special access," Chantri said.
We were only allowed to film through the door.
Two teams work at the same time, but only under the watchful eye of a supervisor.
The scanners count hundreds of ballots at a time, which are then boxed and marked in red ink before being stored in a secure warehouse.
In the next room, the tallies are stored on an ordinary desktop computer, which does not have any internet connection. The registrar keeps it offline so it can't be hacked.
"On election night at 8:01, we put a USB drive into that computer and sneaker net it, we actually walk it in our sneakers, to another computer and load it onto our website," Chantri said.
About a quarter of the voters choose to use electronic voting machines, which are locked inside these sealed cases until election day.
Despite talk of fraud or a rigged system, voters we talked to don't see evidence it would happen here.
"I'd say we have about 99-percent confidence," Dennis Korabiak of San Jose said.
