COMMUNITY CONNECTIONS

An eager group of League of Women Voters and AAUW voters joined Margo Reeg for a tour of the Ballot Processing Center (BPC) in Industry on November 5. Our tour guides were Michael Iterralde, Kathay Feng, and briefly Jeff Klein, Director of the BPC.

Highlights of the tour were seeing the drug-sniffing dogs examining the trays of ballots brought in from the Post Office and from the Ballot Drop Boxes. This is to protect the employees who are handling thousands of ballots. The high-tech signature verification machine operates at an amazing speed–about 6 envelopes per second. Any envelope lacking a signature or one where the signature does not match is kicked out for hand examination. Signatures are compared against the DMV signature and all Voting signatures from previous elections. This machine also slits the envelopes.  Teams of trained workers did the hand comparison of signatures looking for specific details to verify match.

Banks of workers examine ballots which have passed the signature check. They check the ballot for tears, marks, spills, and extraneous extra items in the envelope. Ballots that have stains or tears are sent to a separate area to be remade by a pair of workers. The ruined ballot and remade ballot are kept together.

At about 3:15 PM a batch of ballots that had been scanned and counted was safeguarded inside a glass walled, locked room. The new vote ballot tally of 93,000 additional ballots was posted while we were watching. After being counted the ballots are boxed and stored for 18 to 22 months in case a recount is requested.  While we were on our tour representatives from the federal Department of Justice arrived to examine the processes of ballot counting. This is somewhat unusual for a state election with no federal items on the ballot.

The part of the 1% manual count had been done in the morning. Ballots from 1% of the precincts are examined by hand by  teams of 3 people as an added accuracy check on the electronic count. About 25,000 ballots had to be hand checked.

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