Here’s what can go wrong on election night — and how county clerks will respond

Every inch of the Summit County clerk’s office in Coalville is full of ballots and people there to count them.

Ahead of Nov. 5, the office is rebranded as the “election center,” where volunteers and employees sink into a rhythm of counting ballots and verifying signatures as they come in.

“We’re super busy processing today,” Summit County Clerk Eve Furse said Oct. 24.

The work they do ahead of election day will, she hopes, help the day itself run smoothly, Furse said. There are hiccups and hurdles election officials have to prepare for— but they do prepare.

“We want to be the Chick-fil-A drive-thru of elections. We want you to get in, vote, get out,” said Cache County Clerk Bryson Behm. “We’re prepared for anything.”

“That was unexpected”

Lines are the most common issue, Behm said, and the most likely to stall election results. If there are still people in line when polls close at 8 p.m., according to state law, every county in the state has to keep polls open until the last person has voted — as long as voters were in line before 8 p.m. Counties can’t post results until polls are closed.

Most other problems are predictable, both Behm and Furse said. Cache County has a backup voting center in case of a power outage or weather event, and Summit County has backup generators for the same reasons, plus alternate voting centers.

Furse said she also has alternate poll workers at the ready in case anyone gets sick or snowed in on Election Day.

But it’s impossible to predict everything. Last election season, someone in Tooele County hit an election box with their car the weekend before Election Day, said Tooele County Clerk Tracy Shaw.

“That was unexpected,” she said.

Election officials were able to pry open the ballot box door and get the ballots out, she said. That box was decommissioned and taken off the list of drop locations online.

“By and large, the public were not overly affected,” Shaw said. “It worked out really well.”

But it prompted Shaw to consider other unexpected problems. Last week, Shaw said she “freaked out the whole [elections] team” as they processed ballots by asking them, unprompted, to work through a hypothetical scenario in which a ballot is opened and white powder “flings out everywhere.”

“Everybody looked at me like, ‘buzz kill,’” Shaw said.

But the scenario was based on a real threat: the FBI intercepted such a letter addressed to Utah Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson, Utah’s top election official, last month. She was one of at least 20 election officials to receive such a package.

“Why couldn’t it be sent to us?” Shaw said. “It very well could be.”

Shaw and her team walked through that and other safety-related scenarios: They would isolate and get away from the potential threat, alert the authorities and remain calm.

“I’m feeling really grateful that we haven’t had those types of scares, but we’re talking about it often and trying to prepare against those types of things so that the day seems really easy when they don’t happen,” Shaw said.

A system of redundancies

Election officials can start posting results as soon as the polls close — meaning, once Utah’s last voter cast their ballot.

That’s the final step in a weekslong process full of redundancies and safeguards, said Furse, the Summit County clerk. Each step until then is double-checked and supervised. Every time a ballot advances through the pipeline in Summit County, at least two people oversee its progress.

Before election officials started collecting ballots, they tested the machinery. “Logic and accuracy” tests confirm that voting machines are counting correctly, said Behm, and are open to the public.

Processing days — days dedicated to collecting, verifying and processing ballots — are also open to public observation. But the individual jobs of counting ballots, verifying signatures and separating ballots from their envelopes are reserved for teams of two trained employees or volunteers.

In the windowless Summit County “election center,” after two people have picked the ballots up from ballot drop boxes or the postal service, two different people verify signatures. Then, two people perform a “signature audit” — a random audit of 1% of already-verified ballots to double-check for accuracy.

A pair of people unseal the envelopes; two people separate, flatten and count the ballots. Eventually, two people will run the ballots through the tabulation machine, which isn’t connected to the internet, and tally the results in an offline spreadsheet. Cameras monitor every room in the election center, Furse said.

Some counties have mechanized several of these steps. There are machines that open and separate ballots, and others that verify signatures and count ballots as they come in. In Summit County, “we have people” who do it manually, Furse said.

But even the mechanized processes require human verification. Election officials in Cache County reconcile their results “every single day,” Behm said, to make sure machines and humans have counted correctly. Tooele County does the same, Shaw said.

Summit County’s tabulation machine will flag things like stray ink marks, double votes or empty bubbles, Furse said. All of those ballots have to be reviewed by a pair of human workers.

It’s a system of redundancies, clerks said.

“It’s not some nebulous system that sorts through these [ballots],” Shaw said. “Humans do most of that work. … It’s people you elected — friends and neighbors.”

How signatures are “cured”

The biggest issue that could keep a ballot from being counted is a missing, or “uncured,” signature — a signature that does not match official records. Clerks most commonly measure signatures against the signature on the voter’s driver’s license, but can also compare to previous ballots, absentee ballot requests and other previously-vetted signatures on file.

Uncured ballots are rare, Shaw said. As of Oct. 24, Tooele County had identified 47 uncured ballots out of nearly 5,800 — less than a tenth of a percent.

Counties will notify voters within 24 hours by phone, email and official mail if their signatures don’t match, clerks said, and give the voter a chance to re-submit a new ballot or an updated signature.

The second risk, Shaw said, is mailing your ballot too late. Ballots have to be postmarked before Election Day — this year, the deadline is Monday, Nov. 4. If you’re dropping your ballot off on Election Day, Shaw said it must be dropped in an official ballot drop box.

Voters can find a drop box and track their ballot on Utah’s election website, vote.utah.gov.

Counties will start releasing results as soon as polls close on Nov. 5, but it could take time to know the final outcome of the election, Furse said. Her biggest ask of voters on Election Day? Talk to people.

“Go talk to somebody they haven‘t talked to in a long time, find something they can agree about,” Furse said. “Because we‘re all going to be here when the election is over, and we ought to be able to talk to each other. That’s what I want people to do.”

Shannon Sollitt is a Report for America corps member covering business accountability and sustainability for The Salt Lake Tribune. Your donation to match our RFA grant helps keep her writing stories like this one; please consider making a tax-deductible gift of any amount today by clicking here.