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Editor’s Note: This story is part of Cascadia Daily News’ mini-series “pre-bunking” misinformation and disinformation ahead of the 2024 election. The series will continue to explore the democratic process in Whatcom County.
Unless a voter reveals which candidate got their vote, nobody will know.
The current U.S. election system is designed to both verify someone is voting legally, and to make their choices anonymous.
The “secret ballot” system was first rolled out in the U.S. during the 1888 presidential election.
“By allowing voters to keep their ballots secret, they could make their voices heard without the fear of coercion or intimidation,” writes Matthew Tate-Smith for the nonprofit Campaign Legal Center.
This is accomplished through the use of a ballot return envelope — which is issued to each voter with a unique ID number — and a security sleeve and ballot, neither of which contain voter identifying information.
Once election return envelopes arrive at the Voting Center in downtown Bellingham, they are run through the Agilis election mail sorting and processing system.
This large conveyor-style machine stretches out in a corner of the basement room in the Whatcom County Courthouse. It expedites the process of scanning the barcode on every return envelope, snapping a picture of the signature and changing the status of the ballot to “received.”
The machine also determines if the envelope is too thick or too thin — indicating the possibility of an empty envelope or one stuffed with more than one ballot. Those are separated out and dealt with by election staff on a case-by-case basis.
“We want to make sure there is a ballot in every single return envelope, and that there’s not two ballots in one return envelope,” explained Whatcom County Chief Deputy Auditor Amy Grasher, who was the elections supervisor for the previous 12 years.
The signature on the envelope, which affirms the ballot is coming from the voter and asserts that the voter meets the qualifications to vote, is then matched by election staff against those in the Washington voter database.
“If your ballot is rejected for being unsigned or the signature doesn’t match, it’s not the end of the road,” Grasher said. “We will mail you a letter. We will call you. We will email you. And, if you sign up for text messages, you’ll be notified that your ballot has been rejected and the steps to fix it.”
Once signatures are reviewed, the return envelopes are run back through Agilis. Rejected ballots are pushed down the belt and into one tray, while there is the satisfying sound of the bottom of accepted envelopes being sliced open and ending up in another tray.
The tray of open envelopes are then brought over to a table of election workers, who quickly separate the envelope and the security sleeves containing the ballot. (Ballots returned without a security sleeve will still be counted.)
“Once separated, the identity of the voter is unknown to ensure your votes remain private,” states the Whatcom County Auditor’s Office website.
A different team of election workers then removes the ballot from the security sleeve, having no way to know which security sleeve came from which return envelope.
Only then, after this multi-stepped process, will the ballot be scanned into the Election Center’s system to be tallied on Election Day.
All the envelopes — accepted and rejected — and the paper ballots are securely stored as part of the reconciling. In its simplest terms, this means that at the end of the process, the total number of ballots received matches the total number of ballots accepted and rejected.
“The accepted ballot total needs to match the total number of ballots we have scanned,” Whatcom County Auditor Stacy Henthorn confirmed.
Isaac Stone Simonelli is CDN’s enterprise/investigations reporter; reach him at isaacsimonelli@cascadiadaily.com; 360-922-3090 ext. 127.
