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In what is poised to be one of the most consequential presidential elections in modern history, elections officials are doing all they can to assure voters their ballots are safe and secure.
In Ottawa County, Clerk Justin Roebuck has been teaming up with Keep Our Republic, a nonpartisan civic education organization putting on events nationwide to share reliable, accurate election integrity information.
Since the 2016 presidential cycle, election integrity has become a politically contentious issue, with allegations of Russian interference. That evolved into allegations of voter fraud coming from far-right conservative groups after then-President Donald Trump lost his reelection bid in 2020 to Joe Biden.
“We definitely get a lot of questions about trust in the voter process … questions about how we can trust that noncitizens are not on the voting rolls, questions that talk through the ballot imaging feature as well as the ability for challengers to sort of stand behind us and view the election results process where we put in encrypted flash drives into our secure computer,” Roebuck said in an interview Thursday.
What is ballot imaging?
In conservative Ottawa County, Roebuck has been on the defensive after the local Republican Party — of which he is a member — approved a nonbinding resolution expressing “distrust and a lack of confidence” in Ottawa County’s elections and made several demands of Roebuck on how he performs his duties on Election Day.
“The resolution calls upon me in my capacity as the county clerk to ‘implement a ballot image saving feature’ that is an optional component accessory on our tabulators,” Roebuck said. “The resolution also contains a request for ‘immediate testing’ of the ‘ballot image saving feature’ in public — requiring a minimum of 1,500 ballots be tested for this process.”
Digital ballot imaging is a process where, before scanning and counting the ballot, the tabulator captures a full digital image of the voter’s ballot. The images are stored on a removable encrypted USB flash drive that houses the results data for the tabulator.
Justin Roebuck, the Republican clerk for Ottawa County, Mich., speaks with his colleagues Lisa Wisman, left, and Katie Bard, in their West Olive office. Roebuck says he has been dispelling election lies about alleged widespread fraud in elections since 2016 and is prepared to do the same this year. Matt Vasilogambros/Stateline
Roebuck said the image feature is not utilized in Ottawa County because it is not addressed in Michigan law and current election statutes require a paper ballot to be counted by optical scan tabulation, which produces a verifiable receipt for every vote cast.
Roebuck said the feature has never been used since the county purchased new voting equipment in 2015 because “the storing of these digital files vastly delayed the ballot scanning process, taking the typical 4 to 5 second processing time to over one minute per ballot in order for the tabulator to save the image and count the ballot.”
“This time delay is significant enough in an Election Day precinct setting, where voters would be lined up waiting for the ballots to be scanned, but in the process of counting absentee ballots — it would delay the vote count by many hours in large jurisdictions and affect the timely delivery of election results,” he said.
Another concern Roebuck said he has with capturing ballot images is securing the images to prevent potential breaches or hacks.
“There are no guidelines that cover the storage and/or display of ballot images captured by voting equipment, and such images could be subject to manipulation much more easily than the actual paper ballots, which are sealed in approved containers on Election Night by bipartisan teams,” Roebuck said.
“I am absolutely not willing to risk the loss to voter confidence and potential malfunction of election equipment for the use of an optional feature,” he said.
He also said that in conversations with numerous colleagues across Michigan, “I have not found one county using the ballot imaging feature. This includes all West Michigan counties, across the three approved election equipment vendors in the state.”
The role of AI and disinformation
Keep Our Republic has hosted several events over the past few months, including a session in Grand Rapids on artificial intelligence and national security on Sept. 18 featuring former U.S. Attorney David J. Hickton.
Hickton said the salvation of elections is found in the application of the rule of law.
“We need to be discerning and skeptical of what you read online,” he said. “I don’t think regulation and innovation are at odds. I think with regulation, we can have greater innovation.”
Keep Our Republic has hosted several events over the past few months, including a session in Grand Rapids on artificial intelligence and national security on Sept. 18, 2024 featuring former U.S. Attorney David J. Hickton | Sarah Leach
Hickton said that when citizens engage in the protection and defense of elections, they become informed.
“The average citizen finds some of this conflict is distasteful and they avert their eyes,” he said, but “being in community forums, going to events like this, working the polls can help. I do it by working with one person at a time.”
He said foreign threats are real, but not necessarily accurate the way current political candidates like Trump present.
“We have a foreign threat and we have people benefitting from doing it domestically,” Hickton said. “We have a former president talking about hard-working immigrants in Ohio who were welcomed and they were described as barbaric because of their status. We don’t punish that to my satisfaction.”
Those statements referenced statements Trump made during his only debate with Democratic presidential candidate and current Vice President Kamala Harris when he falsely said Haitian immigrants were “eating dogs and cats” in Springfield, Ohio.
“It’s better to be infamous than famous,” Hickton said. “If you get a liar’s dividend … you deny, deny and wait for the next outrageous things … and you can turn the story of eating dogs and cats to blame Democrats on an assassination attempt on Donald Trump.”
Hickton said that kind of rhetoric is dangerous.
“If everything is false, then nothing is real,” he said. “The whole concept of election fraud is a myth. … The internet is being used to divide us. It used to be foreign interests. Now it’s here.”
Do dead residents vote?
In short: No, according to bipartisan election officials from six swing states.
A key event this fall for Keep Our Republic took place on Sept. 19 in Ann Arbor, which featured secretaries of state and election supervisors and officers from what are considered to be six battleground states — Michigan, Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — for an elections integrity forum titled “Ballots and Battlegrounds: Ensuring Election Safeguards.”
Lamont McClure, the Northampton County Pennsylvania executive, said he was pleased to say “no dead people vote in Pennsylvania’s Northampton County.
“There have been times when people have tried to get ballots, but it’s very rare,” he said.
“We do get the rare occasion when someone casts a ballot, but then passes away before it gets counted, said Chet Harhut, Allegheny County Pennsylvania deputy division manager. “Technology has become very useful in sorting out ballots that way.”
Al Schmidt, Pennsylvania Secretary of the Commonwealth, said: “Out of all the things that are out there, deceased voters is the easiest one to prove. You have a record of when the person died and when the vote was cast.”
Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s GOP secretary of Ssate, echoed those comments: “If you have a clean list, then people have trust,” he said.
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger speaks at a Sept. 19, 2024 panel of bipartisan election officials from multiple battleground states hosted at the Gerald R. Ford Library in Ann Arbor. | Kyle Davidson
Do noncitizens vote?
In short, very few.
Of the 1,632 noncitizen people who attempted to register to vote in Georgia, Raffensperger said they couldn’t affirm their citizenship.
“They weren’t added, so that’s the good news,” he said.
In fact, eight states have constitutional amendments that only American citizens may vote in elections, he said.
“You want to restore trust, you need to require a photo ID and have an amendment ensuring that only citizens are voting in elections,” Raffensperger said.
Meagan Wolfe, Wisconsin Election Commission Administrator and Chief Official, said her staff work on updating voter rolls daily.
“We have more than 1,900 local election officials,” Wolfe said. “The clerk has the legal authority to the information that is provided to them to act upon that voter record.”
Kim Pytleski, clerk of Oconto County, Wis., said there are even local reports on who has moved or who had died.
“We have our neighbors looking,” Pytleski said. “Do we know if somebody moved or somebody passed? We have information coming from federal, state, local [authorities]. … We also have the people on the ground helping.
Even after the election, Wolfe said elections staff work with the Department of Corrections to make sure no one “convicted of a felony voted. … It’s always a small amount, but it’s something that happens after the election.”
Lisa Posthumus Lyons, Republican clerk and register of deeds for Kent County, said clerks have an obligation to “keep the voter rolls clean.”
“I have never experienced a non-citizen having cast a ballot,” she said of the 27 elections she’s overseen.
“I have experienced a non-citizen registered to vote. It’s happening fewer and far between. This is a situation where these people are here legally, they got a driver’s license and were automatically registered to vote even though they’re ineligible.”
Posthumus Lyons said this shouldn’t be the problem nearly to the extent far-right circles claim.
“They are self-reporting,” she said. “They don’t want to break the law and potentially risk their status.”
Clerks Lisa Lyons Posthumus Lyons and Justin Roebuck at the University of Michigan | Sarah Leach
Moving forward
Posthumus Lyons and Roebuck support giving county clerks the authority to clean up voter rolls, particularly with deceased voters.
“It happens about once a month, but more and more as an election nears,” Posthumus Lyons said. “Process to challenge a voter’s eligibility. It is a part of the process and does need to be delicately and properly administered … not used as a weapon.”
She noted that a weak spot in election law is that individual states don’t talk to one another.
Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson, a Democrat, said the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), is a “reliable, secure, state-to-state collaboration.”
“It underscores the value of a decentralized process,” she said. “We have so many eyes and layers of protections in the process, so that it secures the accuracy of our roles.”
Roebuck said the effort is a multi-pronged approach.
“Trust in our elections has to start from the ground up, and we have to be trusted sources of information,” Roebuck said Oct. 17. “I think one of the most effective ways for us to be able to do that — outside of just trying to be generally transparent — is actually making sure that people in the community know we’re available for them.”
Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson and Clerks Lisa Lyons Posthumus Lyons and Justin Roebuck at the University of Michigan | Sarah Leach
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