A trio of election experts had some advice for those who question their state’s election policies and administration—even, maybe especially, those who harbor conspiracy theories about the vote:
Come on down! Watch the process up close. Sign up to be a poll worker. Watch the sausage being made. Be in the room when signatures are verified, when the official vote is announced. When votes are being counted.
“That is part of the process, and I think that’s really eye-opening for a lot of people,” Rhode Island Sen. Dawn Euer told a session on building voter confidence at NCSL’s Legislative Summit. “You get to see a little bit of the process, you see the checks and balances, you go write down the security seals. You do all the accounting. … Usually, those folks become some of the biggest supporters of elections after they have a little bit of additional insight.”
Euer chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee, through which all election-related legislation passes.
Transparency is both important and illuminating, the officials emphasized. Watching the process up close and personal can tame even the most skeptical election critic.
Michael Adams, Kentucky’s secretary of state, stressed the importance of the ground level of election administration.
“We found it’s really helpful to point to the county clerks, to point to the poll workers when you are describing the election process,” he says. “We did a poll in our office a few years ago when we were trying to push some election legislation through and we polled the governor’s approval rating and my approval rating, and they were good, but the county clerks were at 90%. People trust their county election officials.”
He adds, “It’s important, I think, to focus on the locality of this because when you see a conspiracy theorist, they point to these grand designs of these overlords—left- or right-leaning billionaires or foreign countries or the candidate for president they don’t like or whatever it is. But those people don’t really run the election. It’s your neighbors.”
Euer shared how a budding signature scandal in Rhode Island was thwarted early in the signature verification process when a small-town canvassing clerk noticed a suspicious name on a petition.
“The guy who was checking the signatures said, ‘Susan and Bill are on vacation. They signed this thing. They’re not here,’” she says. From there they noticed that many of the alleged signers had actually been dead for years and a media circus ensued.
Ben Hovland, chairman of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission, said provisional ballots “a lot of times get talked about in a negative light, but provisional ballots are a fail-safe. They’re a security measure.”
He recalled a 2020 news conference in Nevada where officials were questioned about why the ballots weren’t counted yet. “They were waiting to check their provisionals to make sure that no one voted anywhere else in the state,” he says. “And so that was the security measure that took time to work through that process. But again, it was a safeguard to ensure that people were allowed to vote who were eligible, but a safety measure to make sure that they weren’t able to vote more than once.”
A recently retired election supervisor from Florida shared how voter verification once veered from election security to domestic tranquility:
“A woman showed up to early-vote and found that her husband had voted her mail ballot already and she was none too pleased about that. I’m not sure to this day that it didn’t lead to divorce.”
Mark Wolf is a senior editor at NCSL.