You probably wouldn’t hand your early ballot to a person you don’t know who promises to deliver it.
I know I wouldn’t, and most people don’t. But a relative few do, as the parties and get-out-the-vote groups go door-to-door.
On the surface, it seems like a practice ripe for fraud, but when you dig into the voting system, as I did Friday, you find that conducting voter fraud by collecting early ballots would be quite hard and probably doesn’t merit a major legislative reaction.
The practice arose as an issue last week first when a video emerged of a man delivering dozens of ballots to a polling place in Maricopa County just before the August primary election. The county’s GOP chairman witnessed the delivery and pointed to it as evidence of voter fraud. It wasn’t: The man was working for a group that attempts to get out the vote and had collected the ballots from voters.
Then, on Thursday, Pima County Recorder F. Ann Rodriguez put out a press release alerting voters to “stranger danger.”
“DO NOT give your voted early ballots to a stranger. This warning includes a stranger who is at your front door,” the news release said, adding: “You have no idea who these people are.”
This news release, similar to ones Rodriguez has put out in previous elections, ticked off members of a group called Mi Familia Vota, a group formed to increase participation by Latino voters. They go door to door registering voters, helping them sign up on the early-voting list, checking on whether they voted, and collecting ballots if the voter wishes.
“We don’t want the county recorder to see us as a stranger or any danger,” Mi Familia Vota canvasser Lorena Howard told me during a Thursday afternoon rally outside Rodriguez’s office downtown. “They (voters) choose to trust us. We’ve built that trust.”
Early ballots are meant to be mailed in, but many of us choose to deliver the ballots or vote at polling places election day. It’s a multifaceted system, a lot different from the simple one based on precinct polling places that most people over 40 are used to.
A relative handful, including some of the voters Mi Familia Vota targets, hand their ballots to members of parties or activist groups working to get out the vote. It’s not just a Democratic Party thing. An invitation to Thursday night’s Mitt Romney appearance in Mesa encouraged attendees to “Bring Your Early Ballots!”
That may seem dangerous, but I learned Friday the dangers are limited. Rodriguez, the Pima County Recorder, showed me around her office’s ballot-collection site on South Country Club Road near Tucson International Airport.
There, workers first scan every early-ballot envelope that they receive. Each envelope has an individual bar code and the voter’s name printed on it, as well as the voter’s signature.
The signatures are key: Recorder’s office employees check the signature on the outside of every early ballot submitted against computerized records of the voter’s signature. If the signature on the envelope isn’t a clear match, they can also check signatures from the Motor Vehicle Division database.
I watched Bob Jones, a retired recorder’s office employee rehired for election season, carefully review one voter’s ballot. It didn’t match the voter’s signature on file. Sometimes spouses accidentally sign each others’ ballots, but none of the four other voters registered at this woman’s home had a matching signature either.
That ballot went to another employee for a second review. In such cases, if the second employee can’t see a match, it goes into a batch of problem ballots, and other employees call the voter whose name is printed on the envelope to try to make a positive identification. It’s an elaborate process.
In addition to those checks, voters can monitor the processing of their early ballots on the Pima County Recorder’s website. One page shows when a voter’s ballot has been mailed, when it’s been received by the recorder’s office, when it’s been accepted and other steps in the process.
So, a voter who hands a ballot over to a canvasser like Howard has significant protections against her doing something wrong with it. The only fraudulent thing such a person could easily do with the ballot is throw it away. Any other significant fraud, like changing the voter’s picks, would likely require replacing the real ballots with fakes or some similar, difficult trickery.
That doesn’t mean nothing should be done. Both secretary of state candidates, Republican Michelle Reagan and Democrat Terry Goddard, told me they support the idea of putting language on the outside of the envelope requiring voters to sign their ballots over to a named collector.
Already, there are instructions there for any person who assists in filling out the ballot — for example, people who help the blind, people who don’t speak English or others with special needs — to identify themselves. The requirement to add ballot collectors to that language was in a bill Reagan sponsored two years ago in the Legislature that later became one of the less controversial elements of HB 2305, the voter law that the Legislature rescinded last year.
I would consider going a bit further and require any ballot collector to give the voter a receipt, which could be as simple as a business card.
Raquel Teran of Mi Familia Vota told me she opposes any new requirements.
“We don’t want any barriers,” she said. “If it’s a barrier for our organization, there’s going to be less people out there participating.”
I walked some southwest-side streets with Howard, the Mi Familia Vota canvasser, on Friday. Nobody handed over a ballot to be turned in, and she didn’t particularly encourage that.
“We want them to mail them in,” Howard said, walking along West Idaho Street. “We’re not saying, ‘Give them to us; don’t mail them.’”
So I could see why a hard-working canvasser takes umbrage at being called untrustworthy or an agent of voter fraud, especially with the checks the recorder herself already has in place.
Then again, a proposal like the one Goddard and Reagan agree on does not present much of a barrier to ballot collectors, and it could add some accountability where right now none exists.
