I did a double take: for once there is a new use of technology that could build trust in our democracy, rather than destroy it.
It turns out California is not alone. Preparing for the biggest mail-order election in American history, a patchwork of local officials in all but about seven states have invested in some form of ballot tracking technology. It will be available in the District of Columbia, most of Virginia, Maryland, Colorado and North Carolina, and parts of Florida, Illinois, Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, and South Carolina, to name a few. To find out if you have access to where you vote, check out the Washington Post’s handy interactive guide to voting in 2020.
There is one important thing to know: you should research the tracking of ballots, either by logging into a website or signing up for alerts – probably regardless of registering to vote or requesting a vote. postal vote.
For an election marked by confusion and deception over the vote, ballot tracking technology is a victory for truth, justice and the American way. This will not end all of our debates on the denial of the right to vote and electoral fraud. But transparency helps us hold local officials and the US Postal Service accountable. And that may dispel some of our own uncertainty about postal voting.
This includes keeping you out of trouble. “Because you’ve already received information that your ballot has counted, you don’t have to put yourself in danger of committing a crime by voting again,” said Tammy Patrick, senior advisor to the election team of the non-profit Democracy Fund.
How does this work? How did you get it? And above all, is it secure? Here is a citizen’s guide based on my conversations with election officials and the companies that make voting technology.
How it works
Given the misinformation circulating these days, I want to be very clear: ballot tracking websites do not allow you to vote online. They don’t follow either WHO you voted for. It is no one’s business but yours.
In the United States, the envelopes containing our mail-in ballots – not the ballots themselves – have numbers associated with individual voters. This is how local officials make sure you only get one ballot and how they will see if you try to vote twice. In many places, these numbers are also embedded in so-called smart mail barcodes, which allow the postal service to track the whereabouts of the voting envelope.
These codes feed the ballot tracking sites. Think of them as the shipping updates you receive after placing an order online – except these are democracy guaranteed. They are a service of your local election commission, although sometimes the sites are grouped together for an entire state. Some places, like Denver, have had a version of it for over a decade, but a whole group signed up or expanded their offerings this year after the pandemic. The activities of BallotTrax, the largest service provider for this technology, have grown tenfold in 2020.
Since elections are run by local governments, what you get from ballot tracking sites can vary. Officials using BallotTrax and rival Ballot Scout software can potentially provide step-by-step mail tracking and alerts in the form of text messages, emails, or even recorded phone calls. Others, like the Maryland local system, which has been in existence since 2012, are simpler: all you need is a website you can log into at any time to see if your ballot has been ‘sent’ or ‘accepted. “. In most places, tracking should work whether you mail your ballot or submit it to an official drop box.
For most of us, these services are just a way of knowing that, yes, even in a crazy year like 2020, our ballots did indeed count. But in some cases, these services help report a problem. For example, sometimes people move and forget to update their address; a tracking site will usually report when a ballot is marked as undeliverable. Sometimes people’s ballots get rejected because they forget to sign them – or even, as my colleague Elise Viebeck warned, because they scribble on the wrong part of the ballot. Depending on your state, a tracking site may report an issue and give you an opportunity to resolve it before Election Day.
Many people are also forgetting about mailing deadlines, and this technology offers counties a targeted way to contact and let voters who have not yet returned their ballots know what to do as soon as possible. possible.
“It’s the most popular tool we offer to voters,” said Tim Scott, the chief electoral officer for Multnomah County, Ore., Which has been offering ballot tracking since 2015. But it’s still under. -used: about 10% of voters have registered. “I think that will change this year,” he said.
Election officials also told me that technology is making their understaffed offices run better. “Just helping to stop some of the incoming phone calls is very helpful,” said Matt Kelly, the absentee voting director for Franklin County, Ohio.
Officials also receive dashboards that help them know when the ballots are coming back and spot problems, like a pallet getting lost in a corner of the post office. It happens.
How do you register?
To find out if you have access to ballot tracking, visit your state or county voter website – a good place to start is The Post’s interactive voting guide, which is full of links.
Signing up for a tracking service is remarkably easy for government technology. (Are you paying attention, DMV?) You don’t have to be a computer or smartphone expert. On a voter portal website, registration usually requires entering a few very simple details, such as your name, date of birth, and zip code. Sometimes when voters have similar names, sites may ask for a little more, like a voter identification number or driver’s license number.
The additional information that these sites collect to send you alerts, including how to contact you, is generally treated as confidential and may not be sold, including to political parties.
You may also not have access to ballot tracking where you live. Why not? In some places, postal voting was previously too niche. Others just didn’t have time to install it before this election. Others have no money. BallotTrax, for its part, says its service costs can range from 2 cents to 5 cents per voter.
If your local election commission doesn’t have the service – or if you just want the most complete picture possible – there’s another free option available to most Americans called USPS Informed Delivery. If you sign up for this service, you may receive a daily email with photos of the mail addressed to you. That way, at least, you can know when your ballot is going to arrive and be on the lookout.
Is it safe?
There is reason to believe that ballot tracking is less of a security concern than other election-related systems. But these services could be abused to confuse voters, so there are some things you need to be vigilant about.
BallotTrax and Ballot Scout say they have taken important steps to strengthen cybersecurity, including working with outside companies to test and audit their systems and enlisting help from the Department of Homeland Security.
The best thing they have going for them is that the data they control isn’t particularly valuable. They are largely based on information from electoral rolls that many local governments already make public. (Yes, whether you voted may be a public record.) Information that enters ballot tracking sites is kept separate from systems that tabulate votes and judge questionable ballots.
But anything connected to the internet is vulnerable, and we know that foreign adversaries are looking for a possible way to sow distrust. Foreign adversaries could try to shut down ballot tracking websites at important times, or even create fake ones to entice voters through phishing, said John Sebes, chief technology officer of the OSET Institute, a non-profit organization that helps develop electoral technology.
And if the ballot-tracking sites are hacked, he said, “they could become a really powerful channel for disinformation.”
In the worst-case scenario, a broken tracking system could be misused to falsely signal voters that their ballots don’t count and that they must vote in person. If this happens, polling stations could be blocked on election day as they try to determine who should and should not vote again.
“It’s not a very good target because it won’t change any votes,” said Patrick of the Democracy Fund. “But it could potentially change the way a voter acts and whether they think they need to come up with a solution on their ballot.”
There is no evidence that this happens with the tracking of ballots in past elections, knock on the wood. And the alternative is that voters are not given any information on their ballots, which could also undermine electoral confidence. “I’m much more concerned about misinformation on social media,” Scott, Oregon said.
Still, it’s a good reminder to be wary of any election communication you receive via text, email, or social media.
A Post reader in Maryland wrote to me about a suspicious email about his mail-in ballot claiming to be from the state’s Election Department, but from an address that ended in ” marylandelections.us ”rather than“ official state elections .maryland.gov. It turns out the email was legitimate: State officials tell me they use the .us address for mass email communications.
Now that state and local governments are communicating more online, we all need to adopt defensive communication standards. This involves ensuring that all communications come from official .gov addresses and making it easy for citizens to tell if they are legitimate. California, for its part, is posting copies of its election emails en masse to its social media accounts, so you can compare your inbox to the real thing.
We must remain vigilant as democracy depends on it.