My experience as a poll worker in Pennsylvania

This squares with my experience in Illinois after a couple of elections.<p>* As a security&#x2F;integrity issue, the ballots themselves are much less scary than the pollbooks, which are what we use to match voters against the voting rolls.<p>* Everything&#x27;s ultimately on paper; there are bar codes, which nobody loves, but they&#x27;re auditable against the readable printed ballot.<p>* Most of the security is physical&#x2F;human; for us, each polling station (a location can have several precincts and thus several stations, each a giant rolling metal box) is sealed using numbered plastic seals before the polls open and after they&#x27;re closed, and everything is recorded redundantly and signed off on by the poll workers.<p>* A matching count at the close of polls is a <i>big deal</i>, a nightmare big deal; in Illinois, we can&#x27;t just shrug off a missing ballot and say &quot;nothing we can do about it&quot;; in March, I had to stay 3 hours late while we resolved a similar issue (IIRC, a mis-recorded provisional). Most pollworkers in my experience are there for the money (I&#x27;ve never bothered cashing the check) and the threat that they won&#x27;t get paid if they count doesn&#x27;t match is extremely powerful.<p>* The local police are not allowed to monitor polling places, and the municipality of the polling place is usually confused about that; in Cook County, it&#x27;s the County Sheriff&#x27;s Department that has authority over polling places. Our cops were very friendly and responsive.<p>* The drama of every election is the the &quot;string line&quot; that defined the 100 foot &quot;no electioneering&quot; radius of the polling place; the entertainment you can count on each cycle is the candidate whose people religiously move their lawn signs inside the string line, and freak out when you remove them.<p>It&#x27;s an interesting system that derives a lot of resiliency from extreme complexity and maximal human touch points --- Illinois elections will never do something with 1 person when the same thing could be done with 2 --- which is sort of the opposite of how we reason about security online. It&#x27;s simultaneously terrifying and reassuring.

This part seems incorrect:<p>&gt; There are strict laws regulating police and poll workers while the polls are open. Police are not allowed within 100 feet of the polling location, unless they&#x27;re actively voting or there on official business at the request of the election board. Additionally, anyone working at the polls in an official capacity is not allowed to wear any clothing with political messaging. One of the officers who showed up earlier in the day was wearing a hoodie with the American flag on it, and the US armed forces oath of enlistment printed in place of the white stripes. As they were leaving, I pulled the officer aside and asked him to remove the hoodie before making his next stop, politely explaining the law.<p>The linked PDF of rules says that the following isn&#x27;t allowed:<p>&gt; Wearing a t-shirt or button supporting a candidate, campaign, or political party (except voters in the act of voting)<p>The American flag with the military oath of enlistment isn&#x27;t any of those. I&#x27;d probably get upset as well if some poll worker tried to tell me I&#x27;m not allowed to wear the American flag on my clothes.

As a non-citizen who had a chance to observe how the process works in California, I was struck by how little emphasis is put in the secrecy of the vote. The whole system looks reasonable <i>except</i> for how easy it can be for poll workers to know what you voted for.<p>Beyond that, the system is clearly geared towards increasing participation and enfranchising as many people as possible (a good thing in a democratic system).

Similar experience here in Georgia. It sounds like there is more to do on setup morning here, since we had to show up at 5am (and didn&#x27;t have things really ready until 6:30 or so). There are <i>so many seals</i> to check and record; lots and lots and lots of paperwork.<p>In Georgia, the ballots are printed from a terminal that the voter uses and then scanned, leaving both an electronic count and a paper trail (the ballot itself is ejected from the bottom of the scanner into a sealed ballot box).<p>However, our scanners jammed 40 minutes into the day; after a couple hours, a technician managed to come to our precinct and opened the ballot box and revealed that a lackluster design in the ballot box caused the ballots coming out of the scanner to sometimes curl up and jam. Without any realistic solution, we just had to open the ballot box every time it jammed (supervised every time to ensure no monkey business) and push any stuck ballots out of the way of the scanner so that more could be scanned. Amusingly we had good success regularly giving the machine a good shove to dislodge any stuck ballots.<p>We also had problems printing receipts---in our case, we only need to print 3 from each scanner, but we ran out of scanner receipt paper. Since another precinct called us during the day looking for extra receipt paper... it wasn&#x27;t available. But, we dodged a bullet, since there was <i>just</i> enough paper to print 2 of the 3 receipts. (1 gets posted on the door of the polling place; 2 go to the county. We wrote an apology on the receipt and only sent 1 to the county. I verified on the Secretary of State website that the votes tabulated for our precinct matched what our receipts printed. Cool to be able to double-check like that!)<p>I spent a while thinking about what a pollworker would need to do to illegally cast ballots. It would be a tall order indeed and would require cooperation and secrecy from <i>everyone</i> there, since the only way to cast a ballot is to scan it, and everyone can see the scanners at all times. I can&#x27;t see it realistically happening in any precinct.

I&#x27;m as much of a technophile as any other HN reader, but I am continuously flummoxed that anyone makes use of the sort of electronic voting machines described in this article. This is mainly from the perspective that a lot of the redundancy and auditability of the system seemed to rely on a bunch of printers working perfectly.<p>Paper ballots and a pencil&#x2F;pen are still hugely more reliable and trustworthy, IMO.

This may be accurate for Philadelphia County -- I don&#x27;t know -- but it is definitely not how voting worked in at least one other area of Pennsylvania.<p>I&#x27;m not saying the person is lying, but they may be misinformed about the procedures applying across the entire state.<p>(I&#x27;m also not saying anything is wrong with how it was done anywhere in PA.)

&gt; The voter approaches their table, and gives their name and party affiliation.<p>I’ve voted in PA for 20 years and have never once been asked my party affiliation. This is all in Philadelphia, so maybe other counties are different? This seems sketchy. Even more so than the cop, who likely didn’t expect anyone to challenge him.

I like how he went into real detail. I had signed up to be a poll worker in Alameda County, California but they had more than enough volunteers so I didn&#x27;t get a chance to get called up myself and see how things happen.

A fascinating post and I&#x27;m thankful for the post. Interesting to learn the experiences first hand.<p>That said, it&#x27;s sad to see we&#x27;re no better than any other forum that just turns into political bullshit arguments sooner or later.

This account expresses the idea that voter fraud would be very difficult to carry out in Pennsylvania - at least with respect to in-person election day voting (it doesn&#x27;t seem relevant to claims of fraud with mail-in voting).<p>However, this link describes a guilty plea of someone convicted of doing just that:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.justice.gov&#x2F;usao-edpa&#x2F;pr&#x2F;us-attorney-william-m-mcswain-announces-charges-and-guilty-plea-former-philadelphia?fbclid=IwAR01GMlz_570Tmd0h74JlxTxsSnooIeZ84f1RpuHqScYV5DiFwhGM1xvTf8" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.justice.gov&#x2F;usao-edpa&#x2F;pr&#x2F;us-attorney-william-m-m...</a><p>So it would be interesting to reconcile this. One possibility is that procedures vary across the state, as some other comments here might indicate. Another is that the system the author participated in isn&#x27;t actually as immune to fraud as he thinks.

504: Gateway Timeout (likely an HN caused DDoS)

I was also a poll watcher in PA this year, and my conclusions were similar to OP&#x27;s: The <i>in-person</i> voting process in PA seems largely OK. However, that doesn&#x27;t mean the 2020 PA general elction was fine; significant irregularities have been reported in PA this year regarding the processing of <i>mail-in ballots</i>.

Cannot connect to the site! Source of post is here though.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;git.sr.ht&#x2F;~sircmpwn&#x2F;drewdevault.com&#x2F;tree&#x2F;master&#x2F;content&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2020-Election-worker.gmi" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;git.sr.ht&#x2F;~sircmpwn&#x2F;drewdevault.com&#x2F;tree&#x2F;master&#x2F;cont...</a>

The police officer mishap was disturbing.

The one thing I do not understand about the US voting protocol is how you can possibly be comfortable with the undeniable huge potential for coercion in the case of voting by mail in such a contested election where both sides see voting for the other candidate as not just wrong bur evil.

Doea anybody ever actually verify the machine receipts by counting the paper ballots?<p>In Canada we just use paper ballots, it works great. The whole count is usually done the night of the election. I don&#x27;t see the appeal of complicated voting machines in the US.

Great writeup.<p>I am very surprised that police officers transport the ballots. When I was a poll judge, we transported everything ourselves, in pairs. Sheriffs did do traffic control and such at central count, like at a sporting event.

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The story about the police is ridiculous and in line with everything activists complain about. Police are not supposed to &quot;puff up&quot; they&#x27;re supposed to be the cool heads.

Looks like HN broke Drew&#x27;s blog.

Seems to have been hugged to death. Anyone have an alternative link?

Url changed from <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;portal.mozz.us&#x2F;gemini&#x2F;drewdevault.com&#x2F;2020&#x2F;11&#x2F;10&#x2F;2020-Election-worker.gmi" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;portal.mozz.us&#x2F;gemini&#x2F;drewdevault.com&#x2F;2020&#x2F;11&#x2F;10&#x2F;202...</a> (by author&#x27;s request).

Thanks for taking the time to write this. It is interesting to someone who lives in a developed country.

&gt; The voter approaches their table, and gives their name and party affiliation.<p>Is this a joke? An electoral system in which votes are not secret is anything but democratic.

If, as Trump claims, Biden&#x27;s victory is fraudulent, it would mean over 100k voted were falsely cast.<p>If that happens to be true, it would put every single election on US soil into question. Pretty much undermines democracy altogether.

none of this addresses:<p>1. all the dead people who voted<p>2. all the ballot harvesting and curing which can be heavily manipulated

Another POV:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dailysignal.com&#x2F;2020&#x2F;11&#x2F;06&#x2F;a-pro-bono-lawyer-for-trump-campaign-shares-what-he-saw-in-pennsylvania&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dailysignal.com&#x2F;2020&#x2F;11&#x2F;06&#x2F;a-pro-bono-lawyer-for...</a>

While reading this I got a sense that all of these anachronistic processes would not exist if voting would be moved online. So many of the contentious issues we see here (mail-in ballots arriving late, machines not printing receipts, etc..) would simply not exist. Online voting seems like such a simpler approach.

Biden only gets lucky in PA a full day after that if you look at vote share per batch, well after in-person votes are counted, and the later you go, the luckier he gets.<p>The pattern is the same in every swing state except Arizona, and in Virginia as well. If you plot out Edison data that has vote count updates, in &quot;normal&quot; states (both Biden and Trump dominant), things are chaotic initially (when in-person votes are counted) and then they settle to a certain GOP&#x2F;DEM ratio, with a very slow drift towards GOP, presumably because rural votes take longer to show up. In the swing states you observe the same initial chaos, and the same slight initial drift towards GOP, but then Biden starts to get very lucky indeed, and his luck improves as time goes on.<p>To be fair, this could just be artifact of how votes are counted, in which case I&#x27;d like to see what could lead to such a pattern _only_ in the swing states. Or this could be evidence of vote rigging by all means necessary. No matter which side you&#x27;re on, this should be looked into.

I&#x27;m curious where everyone is getting their &quot;news&quot; at. For one, the &quot;blue wave&quot; of mail in ballots is a myth: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;LIX2cwQ.jpg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;LIX2cwQ.jpg</a><p>Two: No one is really questioning the machines not &quot;working right&quot;. It is clear that there is no validation with the mail in ballots. MIB&#x27;s are some of the most rejected ballots there are, yet no one seems to have any stats on this, or the stats provided are very low. Then you factor in tons of twitter and facebook posts of women saying that they were sent two ballots, one for their maiden name and one for their current name, at both their current address and their old addresses. Never mind that it is state law in most of these places that a ballot has to be &quot;solicited&quot; and cannot just be mailed en mass via mail. Put another way, you can&#x27;t just mail 5 million ballots out to just 1 million physical addresses. I would not be surprised if during a recount, 50% of these MIBs are rejected.<p>Three: elections are quite predictable. There are 100&#x27;s of counties that for the last 40 years have always predicted the outcome. If this county is blue, then blue is our president, etc. This seems to still be the case this time around, except for the states in question.<p>People&#x27;s Pundit Daily <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;Em0R9DRSbIE" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;Em0R9DRSbIE</a> for the most part has been a really good source of information on behind the scene numbers and what &quot;normal&quot; elections typically should look like. I&#x27;d recommend it.