The Orange County (OC) Registrar of Voters’ office is installing small scanner devices in some of their ballot boxes near the deposit slot to increase the level of trust and security during the upcoming June 7 elections.
“A voter, if they've signed up through OC ballot express, can push the button on the scanning device, scan the QR code on the return envelope and that information will then get transmitted through a secure cloud server to our election management system to know that that person has put a ballot in that box,” said Orange County Registrar of Voters Bob Page.
Page made the announcement last week about the new tool during a remote press conference.
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“This is voluntary,” he told the Southern California Record. “We're testing it only at nine locations for this election. We want to see how well it works, how quickly it can get notifications to voters, how well voters respond to it, and how much they like it.”
The pilot program of scanners is designed to provide an additional layer of mail ballot tracking.
“By law, all of our equipment has to be air-gapped and cannot be connected to the internet,” Page said. “The other thing that we do to ensure the accuracy of equipment is that before and after each election we mark up test ballots and run them through the equipment to make sure that the equipment is counting the votes correctly. We do that before the election.”
Two local representatives from the watchdog group Election Integrity Project (EIP) met with Page last week to discuss training their observers as well as the training of customer service representatives that will work in OC vote centers.
“We've had requests from observers who want to ‘watch’ our training so they can see how we train our customer service reps who work in the vote centers,” he said. “We will have our observation plan. We'll have the same setup with the television screen monitors. At each station where somebody is comparing signatures, there will be a television monitor. So, we will continue all the things we've done in the past to ensure that that we're open and accessible for observers.”
As previously reported in the Southern California Record, OC was among the county election officials the EIP sued earlier this year alleging in their lawsuit that California’s voting practices are unconstitutional.
"We'll keep working with them and keep assuring them and answering their questions but ultimately I can't make them think a certain way or agree with us but we're going to keep conducting the election as best we can and be completely transparent about how we do it," Page added. "We are generally going to continue to take this very seriously. It's an ongoing process with multiple approaches to election security that we will continue to do and we'll keep talking to our voters and answering their questions."