All about the 'chain of custody,' the process that keeps elections secure

[RandySF]

In any given election, a whole lot of people handle the ballots and voting equipment. So how does a ballot stay secure and countable after it’s left the voter’s hands?

That’s possible thanks to a critical safeguard in election administration called the chain of custody. The chain of custody is a huge part of why voters can trust that their ballots are counted exactly as they intended.

Voters may not give much thought to this process, but if you’re concerned about the security of your ballot and the integrity of your vote, here’s a full explanation of how the chain of custody works.

The chain of custody is the process that ensures election materials are handled properly and by the correct people at every step, between when ballots are printed and when everything is put into storage after the election. It involves a prodigious amount of documentation of who is handling election materials, when, and what they do with them.





https://www.votebeat.org/2026/01/16/chain-of-custody-ballot-voting-machines-verification-election-security/

[Ms. Toad]

1. On a quick skim - it's a good explanation of how things are kept secure.

Thanks for posting it.

[jfz9580m]

2. Indeed

Nothing I miss as much as trust in the last 15 years..

[jfz9580m]

3. This is one of the most comforting things

I have read in a long time RandySF. So thank you:

Who is responsible for maintaining the chain of custody?
Importantly, almost nothing in the chain of custody involves one person working alone. Ballots are typically handled by groups of election officials working together, for instance. In many places, forms demand signatures from multiple people.

“Nearly every single thing we do in the election world is done in teams of two at minimum,” Barton said. “You’re not only documenting, but you have someone else who’s affirming it.”

Many states require such paperwork to be signed by two people from opposing political parties to add additional strength to such attestations. It’s one of Barton’s favorite things about elections, she said — that, even in an increasingly polarized nation, elections are an opportunity for people from both major parties to com

I left the US in disgust after an Si Valley adjacent job that I felt was gamifying the work place and stripping workers of the basic right to know. The place was run by CS majors.

That’s how I see it now..at the time I was confused about how nothing felt like the old (Google, Microsoft and Facebook free) NIH, which for me at least had been a very secure and happy environment, where the difficulty of science was the sole barrier to progress.

This was like the worst aspects of bureaucracy (i.e. corporate liability only..no real rights even for pis of any non-sleazy kind, let alone students and least of all postdocs, a despised class of temp of no account in that environment). My earlier school was not like that. My first school’s EECS dept was like that, but not the natural sciences. And the BME dept then had a very decent chair and Mech Engg. seemed way more decent.

In that place security was more the cultish, non-transparent, gate-keeping type with the expectation of sycophantic “trust” in some creepy CS types than the type of oversight this article talks.

I am generally a fairly happy person since I try to stay away from conflict. It is why I have a DU account with the security of MIRT and the admins and not a Facebook/Substack/YouTube or Twitter account. It always vaguely disgusts me to use any non-DU web.

I never get into serious in-group confrontations it I can help it.

But I feel unmoored and icky anywhere with no serious rules or oversight. The only other place online I briefly tried that wasn’t icky was Mastodon. But I already have a DU account so I don’t need any others. I like civilization not the Law of the Junk Jungle which is subject not to evolutionary biology/the laws of physics or saner human systems, but the junk science of a junk-producing and extractive private sector untempered by a robust, non-Yimby, democratic public sector.


Thanks for this . I am in India and my dad and I were discussing how unfortunate it is how much of defense research is now outsourced to private sector firms.
It used to be that there were people with secure jobs and pensions (all the things Musk etc are trying to destroy..)..sure there was some corruption, some inefficiency and incompetence.
But there was always accountability . It wasn’t just nameless, faceless gig workers (who are exploited themselves) and where these companies themselves are just opaque and unknown and they access your information and you are supposed to take a growing ghastly tumor of greed, extraction with no explanation or oversight but with transactionalism and extortionate deployment of truly petty laws (e.g.: marijuana laws. This is India. They have been using that stuff forever. The Brits bought prohibition and now Reliance/Adani etc want to colonize the place).

I never viewed the NIH postdoc as a gig job or temp work. It is not well-paid. But that’s because, what you don’t have in terms of money, you have in terms of access to research at some of the best American labs. But if I respected and supported my mentor at that hell, I had no respect for anything else. In Si Valley, the NIH postdoc is desecrated into yet another race to the bottom temp job. I came back home. I trust my own standard bearing more than that..even if I use pot. Which really is my own damn business…I don’t even drive and never did except briefly between 2014-2017 when I was sober and once in 2020 pre-mj.