How mail-in ballots are processed and protected in Vermont

With just a week until Election Day, millions of Americans – and thousands of Vermonters – have already cast their ballots.

The Green Mountain State has permanently expanded mail-in voting after achieving record turnout during the COVID-19 pandemic, meaning more and more of the work in administering an election is done before the first Tuesday in November.

So what actually happens after you put your envelope in the mailbox? Vermont Public's Bob Kinzel spent a morning with Montpelier election officials, including City Clerk John Odum, to learn firsthand how ballots are processed and what measures are being taken to keep the results secure.

More from Vermont Public: Vermont has become one of the easiest places in the country to vote, but gaps remain

This story was produced for the ear. We strongly recommend listening to the audio. We have also provided a transcript, edited for length and clarity.

Bob Kinzel: All right, so we're going to the ballot box right in front of the town hall.

John Odum: This is a kind of box. It's difficult to get involved in this thing. Two keys are required. The slot is very narrow and is protected by a kind of metal lip over it, so no one can get in unless they put a ballot in it. Nobody pours gasoline into it and lights it on fire. It's safer.

OK. Got our ballot papers.

Bob Kinzel

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Vermont Public

Bob Kinzel: Okay, so we have ballots from the ballot box and now let's bring them back to your office. What do we do with them?

John Odum: We will open them. Well, we're going to open the mail-in ballots and then set aside the actual ballots in the ballot envelope. We no longer need the envelope at all, but we will keep these ballots in their sealed and signed envelopes for now.

Bob Kinzel: Odum brings the ballots back to his office and hands them to Deputy City Clerk Sara McMillon, who processes them at her desk. It uses the city's electronic checklist to record whether a voter has officially cast a ballot. It is a system that prevents one person from voting twice.

Sarah McMillon: And then it gets checked in, and then I know that it keeps a record that that person voted. The voter can then log in online and see that we have received their ballot paper. If someone hasn't signed the ballot or hasn't dated the ballot, we mark it as defective and then we can call them and send them to City Hall to check the ballot or we can send them a letter that they can send back to us and say that It is okay for us to count your ballot even if it is not signed.

Bob Kinzel

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Vermont Public

Bob Kinzel: Clerk Odum then takes the ballot envelopes and places them in the city's safe for safekeeping. They will remain there until local election officials begin tabulating. It is a process that can take place several weeks before Election Day. The optical scanning device counts the number of ballots entered but does not announce the results until election day.

John Odum: And again, I'm locking the padlock because our vault is so small that I feel like I need to add a little more security here. But yeah, so they stay there, and then we take them out when it's time to tab them, which some people are doing right now.

So we have one person open it and put it face down. But the idea is that when that person puts the envelopes down, the person taking out the ballots never sees the name. Therefore, no one ever sees both a ballot and a name associated with a ballot. Everything is always locked. It's always in the safe. Once these guys are done, I lock it up again and put it right back in the safe. And that means we only use one thing; We will put three more machines into operation on election day.

Bob Kinzel: The optical scanning devices are locked back into the vault after use and have small blue seals on the cover that clearly indicate whether the device has been tampered with in any way.

John Odum: Where we check that these seals have not changed and that you would have to break into the seals to get to the programming cards. Now could you come in and change these numbers? This is terribly difficult to imagine. If you could come in. I think the biggest concern when you talk about cybersecurity with these tabs is mischief – not so much changing numbers, but trying to get in there and just mess something up so we have to vote again or something like that.

These things are not connected to any network. They don't have modems like cellular modems do, so they're as good as it gets in terms of physical security. Someone would have to physically approach the machine and access it, break those seals and go in there and take a card, one of the memory cards out there, do something to it, you know, break it in half or something. So no, we have no such concerns at all. And I'm really grateful for that, it's not hard to tell if there was any violation.

Bob Kinzel: Processing these early mail-in ballots has kept the Montpelier City Clerk's office very busy these days, and that's true in many communities across the state. In many cities, half of the voters will cast their votes by postal vote this year.

Peter Engisch supported the production of this story.

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