4 ms·

Based on my long experience in California, I have no idea what you could be referring to. I am given ballot(s) in an opaque folder, mark my choices in a booth e

Based on my long experience in California, I have no idea what you could be referring to. I am given ballot(s) in an opaque folder, mark my choices in a booth enclosed on three sides, and feed the ballots into the machine myself. There's no way for a poll worker to observe me making the choices, or the marked ballot. I suppose in theory they could use the order in which people enter to locate a ballot after the fact, but that would involve riffling through a stack of ballots! Voting is county by county, and it is run by human beings that make mistakes, but in the dozens of times I have voted the secrecy of my ballot has been entirely up to me. Party affiliation is not a secret, true, it is a public record. But the actual Please provide a lot more context than "how easy it can be" or please delete your post.

stouset 6y ago
Poll workers can’t riffle through ballots without being detected. The ballot counting device has a locked compartment where the inserted ballots are kept. Only the inspector for the location has the key (although this may be handed to another worker when the inspector takes a break). This compartment has a numbered tamper seal placed on it, and this seal is checked throughout the day and its number is re-recorded each time. Provisional ballots and mail-in ballots are similarly protected. They aren’t behind a locked compartment, but the boxes they go into are again sealed with tamper-evident seals that are—again—numbered and regularly checked. Of course, no system is perfect and inspectors are undertrained (a few hours of training once every other year or so), overloaded at times, and human. As someone in security as my day job though, I’d say the measures in place to prevent tampering, fraud, and ballot disclosure are reasonably sound. Source: I am an SF election inspector.
- mjcl 6y ago
  And the Sequoia optical scanner (the 80s looking one) doesn't neatly stack the ballots inside, they drop into one of two hampers inside (ballots that have write-ins are segregated) and become a huge mess.
jeffbee 6y ago
In my experience, if the machine beeps and spits your ballot out, which it will always do if you don't vote on some of the elections (and I never vote the stuff I don't know about, like school boards) then the poll worker will grab it and try to shove it back in. I don't think they are trying to invade your privacy, they just are trying to be helpful. But, in the end, they aren't respecting the secrecy of my ballot.
- khuey 6y ago
  In San Francisco, at least, the counting machine is programmed not to reject an undervote (it will reject overvotes and other mistakes)

stouset 6y ago

Poll workers can’t riffle through ballots without being detected. The ballot counting device has a locked compartment where the inserted ballots are kept. Only the inspector for the location has the key (although this may be handed to another worker when the inspector takes a break). This compartment has a numbered tamper seal placed on it, and this seal is checked throughout the day and its number is re-recorded each time. Provisional ballots and mail-in ballots are similarly protected. They aren’t behind a locked compartment, but the boxes they go into are again sealed with tamper-evident seals that are—again—numbered and regularly checked. Of course, no system is perfect and inspectors are undertrained (a few hours of training once every other year or so), overloaded at times, and human. As someone in security as my day job though, I’d say the measures in place to prevent tampering, fraud, and ballot disclosure are reasonably sound. Source: I am an SF election inspector.

mjcl 6y ago
And the Sequoia optical scanner (the 80s looking one) doesn't neatly stack the ballots inside, they drop into one of two hampers inside (ballots that have write-ins are segregated) and become a huge mess.

jeffbee 6y ago

In my experience, if the machine beeps and spits your ballot out, which it will always do if you don't vote on some of the elections (and I never vote the stuff I don't know about, like school boards) then the poll worker will grab it and try to shove it back in. I don't think they are trying to invade your privacy, they just are trying to be helpful. But, in the end, they aren't respecting the secrecy of my ballot.

khuey 6y ago
In San Francisco, at least, the counting machine is programmed not to reject an undervote (it will reject overvotes and other mistakes)