The following is presented as part of The Columbian’s Opinion content, which offers a point of view in order to provoke thought and debate of civic issues. Opinions represent the viewpoint of the author. Unsigned editorials represent the consensus opinion of The Columbian’s editorial board, which operates independently of the news department.
A reader who is a regular voter and follows the election coverage wrote recently with several questions about the security of her ballot and the maps the Spokesman-Review often publishes to show how people voted.
Having just marked, sealed and sent off her ballot, she feared she had the “illusion” that her vote is confidential but that there might be ways elections workers could tell how individuals in a household could vote.
This seemed to be reinforced by the maps the paper publishes showing how different neighborhoods or counties vote in different races. So she wondered what level of detail is known and by whom, and under what authority the information is being released.
We get variations of these questions every election, but with recent efforts to undermine the public’s confidence in elections, her letter provides an opportunity to address them all at once.
The most important point is that no one – not election workers nor the newspaper’s map makers – can tell how anyone voted in this or previous elections. The elections office has records of who voted because a voter is credited with voting when his or her ballot envelope arrives in the mail and the signature on the outer envelope is matched with the signature on file. If it doesn’t match, it’s set aside so the voter can be given a chance to reconcile the signature.
A ballot envelope that passes the signature check is opened and the ballot is removed in the inner security envelope and placed with other checked ballots – also still in their security envelopes – for later removal and scanning. There is nothing on the ballot itself that identifies the voter, so by the time it is run through the computer and tabulated, everyone’s vote is anonymous.
Votes are tabulated by precinct. In cities, a precinct is typically a few blocks; in suburbs it might be somewhat larger, and in rural areas it might cover many square miles. It might have a few dozen or a few hundred voters, but the precincts are numbered in such a way to reveal what legislative district, city and council district those voters are in. The political parties use the precincts as the building blocks of their grassroots organizations.
The elections office reports the precinct breakdowns for each race, which isn’t new. They did it before computers and mail-in voting. The big difference now is that rather than poring through a stack of papers several inches thick, it’s possible to get the breakdown for each race on the Elections Department’s website.
This information is public record and has been for decades. It’s one way to check the accuracy of an election, because if 200 people voted in a precinct and 199 voted for the same person, it might be a reason to check the paper ballots.
That precinct data is used by the newspaper for the maps it publishes in the days after an election. They are downloaded into a spreadsheet for some basic calculations, such as margin of votes separating the candidates in each precinct or the percentage of turnout.
The maps don’t show how any one person voted or even who voted. A record of each voter’s history of casting a ballot – or not – is available as a public record, but it can’t be linked to the precinct data.
On election night, we noticed that the number of unmarked ballots in the Spokane County sheriff’s primary, which had three Republican candidates, was much larger than the number of unmarked ballots for the county auditor’s primary, which has only two candidates but one from each party.
The greatest number of unmarked ballots was in precincts that tend to vote heavily Democratic in most elections.
That’s fairly logical, because many Democrats might not care which Republicans make it through the primary and can always pick the one they like best (or dislike least) in the general election. But even though both Spokane County Auditor Vicky Dalton and Republican challenger Bob McCaslin will automatically advance to the general election, members of both parties might be inclined to show their preference.
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