It has come to the attention of the League of Women Voters that the effort to deny the 2020 election and cast doubt on current election security here in Delaware County continues unabated.
We can expect new rounds of lawsuits and new accusations of election fraud in the upcoming general election.
The League wants to assure the public that it was deeply involved in the Herculean effort to put on the 2020 election, and it continues to remain involved in the election process. None of our members has ever reported seeing any sign of fraud.
The election system in Pennsylvania has many checks and balances built into the system to conduct free, fair and secure elections. A few of those checks and balances are:
• Both the mail-in ballots and in-person ballots each have a unique barcode that makes it impossible to run the same ballots through the scanners and mail-in ballot tabulators more than once. Likewise, you cannot vote twice — by mail-in and at the polls — because the poll books record who received mail-in ballots.
• Poll workers at each precinct keep count of the ballots being handed out to each voter four ways: the poll book where each voter is numbered as they come in; the number of ballots distributed to each precinct and the number used; a separate numbered list of voters, and the count on the scanners themselves. All those numbers are repeatedly matched throughout the day. If, for example, 576 voters are checked in, that number should match in the poll book, on the numbered list and on the scanner, and 576 ballots should have been scanned, give or take a spoiled ballot or two, which are also carefully tracked.
• At the end of the night, the ballot boxes are sealed with unique numbered seals in the presence of all that precinct’s poll workers to send to the wharf for storage, and judges of elections run six copies of the tapes off the machines, each of which are signed by each poll worker.
One copy of the tapes is attached to the sample ballot and posted on the door of each polling place so the public can get the vote totals for each race at each precinct within an hour of the close of polls.
One copy of the tape, a copy of the numbered list of voters and a copy of the return sheet goes home with the minority inspector.
• The scanner cannot ever be connected to the internet. When the V-drives that record the votes are taken out of the scanners and sent to the election bureau in sealed, signed across the flap, untearable Kevlar bags, they are “read” by a dedicated computer that is never connected to the internet. Because they are encrypted, no one can go into the reader and change any numbers. Then the vote totals for each precinct are posted on another computer to report the election results to the public online, by town and precinct.
Here’s the important part: If the machine tapes posted on the polling place door do not match the results reported by the Election Bureau to the public at the end of the night, then you would have evidence of election tampering. Somebody would probably notice that and yet such a discrepancy has never been reported.
This machine tape system is the same system used here in Delaware County prior to 2020 and prior to switching to voting machines with paper ballots. The only difference is, we now have backup paper ballots and removable V drives, neither of which cancel out the machine tapes.
Similar safeguards exist with mail-in ballots.
There are cameras on the drop boxes manned by the Delaware County Park police to detect ballot harvesting. Teams made up of a Democrat and a Republican collect the ballots from the boxes each night and take them to secure storage at the Wharf, the central tabulating facility, for counting on Election Day.
The League and many other groups are working hard to educate mail-in voters to put their ballots in the secrecy envelope and to sign and date their ballots so they cannot be challenged. All three steps are important. Those ballots are tracked when they are sent out and when they are returned.
If the election deniers start claiming the 2022 midterm election was rigged it will not be true, at least not here in Delaware County.
Don’t let the election deniers undermine your confidence in our free and fair and accurate election system.
— Anne Mosakowski, president League of Women Voters of Central Delaware County
— Olivia Thorne, president, League of Women Voters of Delaware County