If seventh- and eighth-grade students from Anacapa School are any kind of a barometer, young people are engaged in the 2008 presidential election with an extraordinary level of interest.
County Clerk, Recorder and Assessor Joe Holland took the students on a behind-the-scenes tour of the Santa Barbara County Elections Office last week to demonstrate what happens to the 35,000 absentee ballots the office already has received for Tuesday’s presidential primary. Holland expects 50,000 of Santa Barbara County’s 183,000 registered voters will vote by mail in this week’s election.
With the increasing numbers of people who vote by mail, “Election Day is actually 29 days long now,” Holland explained to Anacapa School headmaster Gordon Sichi’s American History and Society class.
The first step in the ballot envelope’s journey to being counted is the signature on the outside, Holland explained.
“There’s a bar code on there that tells us who you are. So when we receive that envelope back, we send it through a machine that’s called an ASR, automatic signature recognition machine. It goes through and compares your signature with the signature that we have on file for you with your voter registration card, and if it matches then it accepts it,” he said.
“If it doesn’t match, like for me, I’m Joseph E. Holland, if I leave out the ‘E’ it won’t match. … With the ones that don’t match, we’ll actually have a person pull that up, ‘Oh, look at it’s the same J and the S and the PH’, and accept it. But this machine actually accepts about 80 percent of all the envelopes that are returned.”
If someone sends in an envelope without a signature, the elections office tries to contact the voter to have him or her sign the ballot so it can be counted. Once the signatures are verified, the next step is to open the envelopes. Eighth-grade students who had taken the elections office tour last year were impressed to see a new automated ballot-opening machine had replaced the tables of people with letter openers.
“How much did the new machine cost?” asked a student.
“We’re leasing it right now, but it’ll cost us about $80,000 to buy,” answered Holland.
“Is it worth it?” asked another student.
Holland thinks it is. The machine, which can open about 5,000 envelopes per hour, cuts them open on three sides to make sure no ballots are stuck inside. Part of the reason for the security measure, he explained, is that in the 1992 primary there was a razor-close race for county supervisor (between Willy Chamberlin and Bill Wallace, who eventually won the 3rd District seat). The recount results found that about 10 absentee ballots were still in their envelopes and had not been counted. In addition, there are also privacy issues with having the envelopes opened by hand that are avoided by using the machine.
Once the ballots are opened, they’re unfolded and run through tallying machines, which are the same machines found in the county’s 215 precincts on Election Day. The results will not be available until 8:05 p.m. on election night. Until then they are stored on a computer, which is kept under high security. Only two people have access to the machine, and there are cameras throughout the office to make sure no one tries to get in the locked room where it is kept, said Holland.
“What about a hacker getting into the results?” asked a student.
A good question, acknowledged Holland, explaining there is no Internet access allowed in the room, for that very reason. Another new security measure is a directive from the secretary of state barring the sending of results by phone-line modem, as was done in the past. Instead, the results will be driven in to the elections office, which in the case of far-away precincts like New Cuayama, may delay the tallying of the final results by as much as two and a half hours.
“If the election is really close, we may not know who won in California until all of the absentee ballots are counted,” Holland said. He has up to 29 days to certify the final results of the election.
The students got to vote in a mock election, where Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy vied for president. Roosevelt and Kennedy tied with only four votes each, but there were 11 write-in votes, which weren’t officially counted.
“I wrote in Barak Obama,” said eighth-grader Emily Welkowitz, who wore an “Obama ‘08” bumper sticker on her back.
“I think it’s totally interesting,” said eighth-grader Jessica DiMizio. “I like all the new machines and stuff. Last year we saw them opening the absentee envelopes and it was just a bunch of people sitting around a big table.”
Part of Anacapa School’s philosophy is to bring the students into the community, said Sichi, who founded the school, located at 814 Santa Barbara St.
“I can go anywhere in this town with a little notice and people will open up their businesses to us,” he said. “People in Santa Barbara are so generous.”
Sichi said he planned to follow up the field trip with a lesson on voting machines and a discussion of the controversies surrounding them.
When asked if they talked a lot about the presidential primary in class, eighth-grader Haley Yuhas said: “Oh, yeah, that’s all we talk about. It’s great. It’s really, really interesting.”
Polling places for Tuesday’s California primary will be open from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m. For questions and more information, contact the Santa Barbara County Elections Office.