Why Should Delaware Care?
Delaware’s voting processes and infrastructure are the means through which democracy is carried out. But doubts about those processes or a lack of transparency around them could lead to depressed turnouts during elections.
After you cast your vote at a polling place in the upcoming general election, your ballot will follow a path that begins within the bowels of a voting machine and ends with officials from the Delaware Superior Court certifying vote tallies statewide.
What happens in between is a complex system that first involves a voting machine recording a voter’s choices in three different places – onto an electronic memory card, onto an internal voting machine tape, and onto a paper ballot that is stored within the voting machine.
Elections officials have advertised the paper ballot feature as one that they say ensures votes are recorded accurately, because it allows voters to visually confirm that their digital choices leave a paper trail.
The paper ballot includes the written names of candidates picked, as well as a corresponding barcode into which those names are embedded.
While a vote is recorded in multiple ways, Delaware’s Elections Director for New Castle County Tracey Dixon indicated that the official record is the written name on the paper ballot.
It is that record that is counted during a recount or during audit of a voting machine’s total tally, she said.
“If there was a recount or a challenge, yes, it would be a manual audit of all the (paper) ballots from the machine,” she said.
Still, after polls close on Election Day, it is the memory cards from the voting machines – as well as the electronically-scanned absentee ballots – that provide the public with an initial vote count.
Those initial tallies are then posted to the Delaware of Elections’ website the night of the election.
What happens after Election Day?
While officials publicly report a tally the night of the election, the vote counting and certification process is not over.
The day after the polls close, Department of Elections officials meet to determine the validity of provisional ballots that had been cast by voters who were unable to prove their registration at their polling places.
The ballots that ultimately are deemed valid are then added to earlier tallies, but only for candidates running for Congress or for president. Voters using provisional ballots are not allowed to vote in state and local races.
Two days after the election, the vote counting process moves from the Department of Elections to Delaware’s Board of Canvass – a body made up of officials from the state’s Superior Court.
State law directs the Board of Canvass to “publicly ascertain the state of the election” by examining records from “voting machine recording tapes, voting machine certificates, absentee vote tally sheets and write-in vote tally sheets.”
But, how it does that job is not immediately clear.
A spokeswoman for the Superior Court did not reply to a request to comment for this story.
Dixon, from the Department of Elections, also declined to comment on the Board of Canvass’ work, because “it is 100% their process.”
A public question-and-answer sheet published by the Department of Elections notes that the Board of Canvass “manually” counts votes and then declares them as official. The sheet also states that the board is designed to be an independent body separate from the rest of government.
Dixon did note that the Department of Elections provides the Board of Canvass with internal voting machine tapes, and with reports generated by her office’s IT department.
“They review those reports generated by our team,” she said.
Spotlight Delaware has sent a Freedom of Information Act request to the Department of Election for all IT reports sent to the Board of Canvass during the previous four years.
Ultimately, the Board of Canvass certifies election results following their review, which officially marks the ends of vote tallying – unless there are challenges or recounts.
Republicans seek transparency
While Delaware’s vote counting process has not sparked the level of scrutiny seen in political swing states in recent years, it does have its critics.
Jim Weldin, vice chair of the Delaware Republican Party, asserts that Delaware’s elections process is not sufficiently transparent, and he said that leads potential voters to grow suspicious, especially given a national climate of doubts around election integrity.
“That to me is the biggest issue,” he said, while also noting concerns over the number of days voters have to cast ballots during an early-voting period.
Asked about Weldin’s critique, Dixon declined to comment.
Much of the national scrutiny around election integrity has been sparked by the Republican Party, and particularly by former President Donald Trump following his 2020 loss to President Joe Biden.
Still, the Delaware Department of Elections has also sparked its own critiques of late.
Last month, ahead of the Sept. 10 primary, election officials acknowledged that they had misregistered 750 Democratic Party voters into the wrong political party. They provided few details about how the mistake occurred, except to assert that it was a clerical error rather than a computer glitch.
Additionally, the Department of Elections public Q&A sheet includes a question of whether Delaware residents are “allowed to attend the Board of Canvass” meetings.
The answer provided in the info sheet states only that “the Delaware Department of Elections has no authority over the Board of Canvass.”
Voting machine concerns
The type of voting machines that Delaware uses has also drawn scrutiny in recent years.
When New York first sought to move to those machines four years ago from all paper ballots, the pushback was led by a voter rights organization called Common Cause, which claimed the machines were expensive and could be prone to making errors.
Common Cause was also the organization that criticized Delaware’s move to the machines in 2018.
The machine’s maker Election Systems and Software did not respond to a request to comment from Spotlight Delaware. But, in 2023, the company told the New York Times that its “machines were secure and that voters managed to complete their ballots quickly.”
The company has also acknowledged that cyber threats exist that could target election infrastructure.
Last month, Elections Systems and Software held an exercise with federal authorities from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency to examine the resilience of its machines against what it called “emerging threats.”
The exercise simulated those potential threats in order “to enhance readiness and strengthen communication and coordination between ES&S and federal, state and local partners,” according to a press release about the event.
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