Ensuring election integrity with Erie County Board of Elections

Buffalo, N.Y. (WBEN) - With Election Day on Tuesday, one point of emphasis across the country over the years has been election integrity, and ensuring that all the votes are properly accounted for and fairly tallied at the end of the day.

"We have down at the Board of Elections a bipartisan team that actually does that, works together," said Howard Johnson, Democratic Elections Commissioner with the Erie County Board of Elections. "It's one Dem, one Republican, and we have to have a sign off on everything that we do, and it's done bipartisanly."

Ralph Mohr is the Republican Elections Commissioner, and has been with the Erie County Board of Elections for more than 30 years. He says elections run by Erie County are very secure.

"Not only are the tabulators not hooked up to the internet in any manner, but there are a number of safeguards contained within each tabulator," Mohr said with WBEN. "Not only do we have the physical ballot that was cast, but at the end of the night, the inspectors remove a USB port, which will go and have the image of every ballot, as well as the tabulated results. In addition to that, there are backup chips that are contained, which can be used to verify in the event that there is a question with regard to any of the USBs that are pulled. The machines, including the ballots, are picked up starting immediately after the voting, and they're brought back and secured at our warehouse."

In the event there's any close election or there are absentee ballots, Mohr says those all get returned to the Board of Elections that night, and everything gets locked up and secured.

"After the ballots are tabulated and we do the recanvass, there's also a procedure where we go back and we check the voting machines to make sure they tabulated correctly," Mohr noted. "Out of the 360 voting machines that we utilize, we randomly test about 25 of them to go through and count the ballots, hand count each ballot that went through the machine, and make sure that was the result that was reported by that machine. We've been doing that for over a decade now, and we haven't had one discrepancy yet."

Another measure taken by the Erie County Board of Elections to protect the vote of the people is training inspectors rigorously to handle the election.

"We train them from A-to-Z, from start-to-finish, from open-to-close, to what that looks like and what they should be doing, what they should not be doing, what they should be looking for, what they should not be looking for," Johnson explained with WBEN. "Also, to prevent any electioneering we have 100-foot markers that we measure out to ensure if somebody's going to stand in front of a poll or hand out any literature, they're going to do it outside of the poll."

Years before the advances of technology and equipment utilized on Election Day, Mohr says inspectors would call in the numbers to a person at the Board of Elections, and the person at the Board would transcribe the numbers, and those would then be entered it into the election results. That did lead to some mistakes being made on the inspector's part.

"They've been working a long, long day, and after being up from 6 o'clock in the morning until 9:30, 10 o'clock at night when they're tabulating the results, they would make mistakes. The Board of Elections employees are up the same amount of time, they would make mistakes, and different results were reported," Mohr noted. "In this case, there is no ability to go and make mistakes, because the actual USB port is the one that tabulates the results and is what is reported on election night. If there's any discrepancy at that point, or we think that is not possible, we have the backup chips, and we also have the individual ballots themselves that we could refer to."

There is also some concern every year come Election Day of some possible outside influences looking to potentially tamper with any votes or results of a given election. That's where the Board of Elections needs to have a close relationship with local law enforcement to deter any of that action, if necessary.

"There's the rhetoric that's being talked about nationally, but here in Erie County, we work closely with law enforcement here - our sheriff's department, Buffalo Police - and they're ready to, on a drop of a dime, if we have any problems. They're ready to answer those quickly if we need to put them into play or anything like that. So I don't have much concern about that. I think it's going to be business as usual," Johnson acknowledged. "I don't foresee anything where somebody can come in and try to actually steal something or take something. I don't foresee that for us here because we have those things in play."

Regardless whether a race is within 10 votes or within 10,000 votes, Mohr says the process includes a total recount, which occurs by the Board of Elections in the days following the election to make sure every single ballot was counted.

"Our process at the Erie County Board of Elections is very transparent," he said. "Before we program the voting machines, we send letters to the candidates showing them a sample ballot. We invite them to come and watch the programming of the machines, we have candidates and their representatives be able to attend, as well as the general public. Any part of the recanvass process. I think when people go and see all the steps that are taken to ensure that every ballot is counted and every lawful vote that was cast is put into the results, they feel comfortable. We've had elections, a countywide election which was five votes apart, and neither of the candidates that were involved in that race challenged us in court, because they believed the count was accurate and we had done such a good job in the transparency of that process."