How Vermont mail-in ballots are processed and protected

With one week to go until Election Day, millions of Americans — and thousands of Vermonters — have already cast their ballots.

The Green Mountain State permanently expanded mail-in voting after it drove record turnout during the COVID-19 pandemic, which means more and more of the work of administering an election happens before the first Tuesday of November.

So, what actually happens after you drop your envelope in the mailbox? Vermont Public’s Bob Kinzel spent a morning with election officials in Montpelier, including City Clerk John Odum, to learn firsthand how ballots are processed and what measures are in place to keep results secure.

More from Vermont Public: Vermont has become one of the easiest places to vote in the country, but gaps remain

This story was produced for the ear. We highly recommend listening to the audio. We’ve also provided a transcript, which has been edited for length and clarity.

Bob Kinzel: All right, so what we’re going to do is walk out to the ballot drop box just outside City Hall.

John Odum: This is some kind of box. This thing is tough to get into. It takes two keys. The slot is very narrow and is protected by a sort of metal lip over it, so nobody’s getting in there unless they’re jamming a ballot up in there. Nobody’s pouring gasoline into it and lighting it on fire. It’s, it’s more secure than that.

OK. Got our ballots.

Bob Kinzel: OK, so we’ve got ballots from the ballot box, and now we’re going to bring them back into your office. What are we going to do with them?

John Odum: We’re going to open them up. Well, we’re going to open up the ones from the mailers, and then we’ll put aside the actual ballots in the ballot envelope. We don’t need the mailing envelope at all anymore, but we will, for now, keep those ballots inside their sealed and signed envelopes.

Bob Kinzel: Odum brings the ballots back into his office and gives them to Deputy City Clerk Sara McMillon, who processes them at her desk. She uses the city’s electronic checklist to record that a voter has officially sent in a ballot. It’s a system that prevents a person from voting twice.

Sara McMillon: And so then that checks it in, and then I know, it keeps a record that that person has voted. And so then the voter can log in online, and they can see that we’ve received their ballot. If someone hasn’t signed it or someone hasn’t dated it, then we mark it as defective, and then we, we can call them and have them come into City Hall to cure the ballot, or we can send them out a letter that’s that they can send back to us, saying that it’s OK for us to count their ballot, even though it’s not signed.

Bob Kinzel: Clerk Odum then takes the ballot envelopes and places them in the city’s vault for safe keeping. They stay there until local election officials begin the tabulation process. It’s a process that can take place for several weeks before Election Day. The optical scan machine counts the number of ballots that are fed into it, but it does not reveal any of the results until Election Day.

John Odum: And again, I keep that padlocked because our vault is so small, I need, I feel like I need to keep a little extra security here. But yeah, so they stay there, and then we take them out when it’s time to run them through the tabulator, which I’ve got some folks doing right now.

So we have one person who will open them up and put them face down. But the idea is that if this person is putting the envelopes down, then this person who takes the ballots out never sees the name. So nobody ever sees both a ballot and a name associated with a ballot. Everything is always locked down. It’s always in the vault. Soon as I, soon as these folks are done, I lock it back up, put it right back in the vault. And this is, we’re just using the one; we’re going to be running three more machines during the Election Day.

Bob Kinzel: The optical scan machines are locked up back in the vault after they’ve been used, and they have small blue seals on the cover that clearly indicate if the machine has been tampered with in any way.

John Odum: Where we verify that these, that these seals have not changed, and you’d have to get into the seals to get the programming cards. Now, could you get in and change those numbers? That’s awfully hard to imagine. If you could get in. I think the biggest worry when you start talking about cybersecurity with these tabulators is mischief — not so much changing numbers, but trying to get in there and just mess something up so we have to run ballots again, or something like that.

These things aren’t connected to any network. They don’t have any modems, like cellular modems going, so in terms of physical security, they’re as good as you get. Somebody would have to physically come up to the machine and access it and break those seals and get in there and take a card, one of the memory cards out there, do something with it, you know, snap it in half or something. So no, we don’t have those kind of concerns at all. And I’m really grateful for that, it’s not difficult to tell if there’s been any kind of breach.

Bob Kinzel: Processing these early mail-in ballots has kept the Montpelier City Clerk’s office very busy these days, and this is true for many communities across the state. That’s because, in many towns, as many as half of their voters will cast their ballot this year using the mail-in system.

Peter Engisch provided production support for this story.

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