BY DAN HILDEBRAN
Monitor Editor
GREEN COVE SPRINGS— Around 150 people learned about voter registration, vote-by-mail, how voting machines are tested and other election procedures during an election expo, held by the supervisor of elections office on Wednesday, Feb. 9.
Supervisor Chris Chambless told attendees that a lot has changed on election night since he started working in the office in 1997.
“We would have the results on a chalkboard,” he recalled, “and as they were being tabulated the results person would come out and mark it on the chalkboard outside of the election’s office.”
Chambless added that tabulating final results would sometimes last until 3 the following morning.
He added that now, results are posted on the office’s website minutes after 7 p.m., and citizens can view results in the comfort of their own homes.
Chambless said the average voter and even candidates and campaign workers know little about the back-office operations of an election. He said he hoped the election expo would give ordinary citizens a behind-the-scenes look at the process.
Voter registration
Chambless said that when people register to vote, they don’t realize that their identification is validated by the Department of Highway safety and Motor Vehicles, the state’s vital statistics database, the clemency board and the Social Security Administration, in addition to the Electronic Registration information Center: a multi-state clearinghouse containing voter information.
Chambless said that the clearinghouse, also known as ERIC has identified 140,000 Florida voters that have died, 3.1 million Floridians that moved within the state and 700,000 people that moved out of Florida.
Vote-by-mail signatures
Chambless also highlighted the signature recognition classes his staff takes to learn how to validate signatures on vote-by-mail ballots.
“There is a science to recognizing the start, the end lean, the trail, how signatures are done,” he said. “We employ that method to forensically note the similarities, and then again we have multiple staff members that are doing it with vote by mail (to) maintain the privacy and security of the process.”
Programming and testing equipment
Chambless also emphasized that his own staff programs the tabulation machines, and his office does not rely on third-party vendors.
He added that after the machines are programmed, they are subjected to multiple logic and accuracy tests with candidates, political parties and the public invited to witness the tests.
“I think that it’s important to acknowledge the security and logistics from the fact that we use county staff to deliver the polling location equipment to the precincts,” he said. “It’s locked and sealed in cages. It’s verified before they open up the polls at 7 a.m.”
Audits
Chambless also said that for over the last 10 years, every elections office in the state has undergone a post-election audit with one randomly selected precinct in one race hand recounted to verify the results of the tabulation machines.
No internet access
Chambless also said that precinct results are transmitted to the elections office over a closed network, operated by Verizon that is not connected to the internet.
“This is a network that does not touch the internet, doesn’t utilize the internet,” he said.
A Verizon engineer told attendees that after voting at a precinct is complete, a poll worker attaches a special modem to the optical scanner at the precinct which transmits results using Verizon’s cell towers.
“(The poll worker) pushes the button and then the little radio that’s in it sends it to our closest cellular tower,” the engineer said. “It’s just a little blip, a couple of kilobits of data that’s going to the closest tower and then going into the ground to fiber, going over to the Verizon switch in Jacksonville.”
The engineer added that the switch recognizes the encrypted data as on the supervisor of election’s special network, then sends it to the router in the elections office.
“There’s no internet involved,” he said. “It’s all on private IP addresses. If you know anything about computers, it’s not routable at all to the internet, so that is all just a clean process.”
