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The ballots are sealed in plastic bags similar to what is used for shipping. Then a seal is placed across the flap of the bag, and the election officials sign the seal. It would be very difficult (if not impossible) to get into the bags without it being obvious, and that's why I asked about the seals. We had all of the poll workers present sign the seal, in addition to the Clerk, et al. On the day after the election, we'd take the machine tapes (also signed by all pollworkers and officials at beginning and end of the day) and all reports and the prom pack to the County Clerk.
In our situation, our Clerk and I were obsessed with election integrity, so when we had the pollworkers sign anything, we'd explain what we were asking them to sign. We also had those old pollworkers who had been doing it for decades, and they knew every step of the process as much as we did. I can see, though, that if one had ill intent, one could have a few extra envelope seals on hand at the end of the day, and with less experienced pollworkers, someone could ask the pollworkers to sign those extra seals unattached to any envelope. People are tired at the end of election day, and they might not be carefully scrutinizing each document that they're asked to sign. "Sign here, sign here, sign here..."
I would like to see ALL of the election supplies provided through a State agency in order to provide another layer of accountability. Ballots, envelopes, seals, etc. with no products available from the frickin' SUPPLIER!!!!!
The laws are written with the presumption that the Clerk, particularly a County Clerk, is honest. I don't think we can make any assumptions these days, though here in Dane County, I have always felt that the Clerk has been determined to ensure we have fair elections.
I was working for the Town just at the time of the Accenture deal. That gave me the opportunity to be involved in the testing of some of the machines that were to be selected for the HAVA compliance, and with the data conversion to the SVRS. What a frickin' mess that was!!! In our initial conversion, we lost about 25% of our voters off the rolls (we had roughly 4000 registered voters at the time). The County said that that was actually a lot better than many municipalities had encountered. I met a Clerk from a municipality up north who had lost something like 90% of her registered voters in the first go-round. We managed to re-work our voter rolls again and again, until we had all registrations in compliance, with virtually no complaints from voters by the time the next election rolled around.
Just as an example of why someone might have been knocked off the rolls in the initial conversion, if a clerk, in entering a name in the original rolls, had hit the space bar after the name, or entered a comma instead of a period in an address, the name would be knocked off the rolls. Sometimes I couldn't tell WHAT was entered, so I'd copy into a document using different fonts or even a different color of font, and that sometimes helped me to figure out what was mis-entered. It was an agonizing process that cost the State HOW many millions of dollars?????? This was my day. Data entry. Upload document to SVRS website. Receive error report. "$^&*(%#$^^!":argh: More data entry, Upload document to SVRS website. Receive error report. "$^&*(%#$^^!":argh: More data entry, Upload document to SVRS website. Receive error report. "$^&*(%#$^^!":argh: Lather, rinse, repeat.
Regarding Kevin Kennedy, I appreciated the fact that he took the time to answer my questions about the process. That is as far as I am willing to go with that statement.
I can't tell you how glad I am that JoAnne Kloppenburg is a fighter, and that she has retained good, experienced attorneys to deal with this recount. After all, this election is not about her, it is about the people of the State of Wisconsin. We want to know that our votes were counted fairly. That's all.
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