How does Idaho get unofficial election results out so quickly?

by Logan Finney, Idaho Reports

Idahoans in some counties had to wait a day or two for local election results this year. For national outcomes, on the other hand, control of Congress was not known until victories for Democratic Senate candidates in Arizona and Nevada and for Republican House candidates in Arizona and California a full week later.

“The Constitution originated this decentralized system across fifty states where the federal government does not run the election,” Chief Deputy Secretary of State Chad Houck told Idaho Reports on election day.

Associate Producer Logan Finney visited with Houck and Ada County Chief Deputy Clerk Trent Tripple on November 8, 2022 to get a behind the scenes look at the local, state and national coordination it takes to hold a successful general election. Plus, the work it takes to get initial election results out in hours rather than days unlike some of our sister states.

Logan Finney, Idaho Reports:

We are sitting for this interview at the Idaho capitol in the Election Operations Center. Can you first explain for me what that is?

Chad Houck, Chief Deputy Secretary of State:

The Election Operations Center is the nexus of an idea that started three or four years ago. It was originally created out of some election event management or situational management incident response exercises that were conducted out on the East Coast by a group called D3P Project. Effectively what they were doing in that project was looking at: If major incidences were occurring in precincts on election day, how were you triaging those incidents? How were you cataloging them for post fact review, and how are you managing them in real time? What information and what resources were coming to play? What people were at the table? How was it handled in terms of an emergency management standpoint?

So, we took that information from that exercise, brought it back here to Idaho, and started developing both the tools that would be needed to execute that well, as well as the personnel, the resources and the actual environment to operate those tools in.

IR:

Can you give me some examples of those incidents that you guys are keeping an eye out for?

Houck:

It could be a variety of things. It can be anything from one of the most common ones like a power outage, or a major traffic incident that would shut down a significant chunk of roadway. You know, it’s not uncommon that we might have a rockslide here in Idaho that would cut off a highway, we’ve seen that over the past couple of years with cuts down major throughways between north and south. Well, those same things could cut off sections of a county and affect folks being able to transit to the polls in some of our more rural areas.

We want to be able to know that, so that we can help resource and help the county clerks in those areas make the necessary decisions and find the resources they need. Then also, if that incident is such that it requires a statewide response – for example, maybe the extension of the polling location closing times in the north – then we have the ability at the state level to get involved early on, get that information into the court system where a judge can make that decision, and give that call to be able to extend that time out, because in those cases it does take an actual court order to do something like that.

IR:

Sure, you guys have forty-four different clerks across the state running different elections.

Houck:

Right, and they have their hands full. The clerks in the middle of the day have their hands full just dealing with the things that are coming up in their space. But it also is really interesting to be able to look at: Are there any trends that cross maybe county to county, or across the state, or across a region as a whole? Are there weather incidents that maybe would be taking out significant chunks of the power grid, for example, like a major ice storm or snowstorm?

Thanks to the partnerships that we have here with, for example, the Office of Emergency Management and Idaho State Police, we can see those power grids. We can see Internet connectivity issues, we can see traffic patterns and police calls, all on the tool that’s up on the screens that these folks are looking at. They can look at those different events in layers, turn them on, turn them off, see how they are impacting the final layer which is the overlay of all of our polling precincts statewide.

IR:

Have you had any incidents this election?

Houck:

Fortunately, here on this particular this particular day, nothing of major consequence by any means. We’ve certainly had some incidents, mostly small, mostly addressable, but the big thing is we’re logging those. We’re looking at them to see if trends are emerging. If we’re seeing something in multiple locations, then we know it’s something that might need a statewide response like a bulletin or a heads up.

A good example of that, not in this election but in 2020, we saw some robocalls that were originating starting on the East Coast and we could see on the timelines as they were coming in. We were watching from partners that are reporting in through some of our different national partners like the EI-ISAC and CISA, the Department of Homeland Security. We’re seeing these bulletins coming out of these different states as these robocalls are progressing across the country.

We were able to actually prepare a press release and have that press release vetted before anything ever happened here in Idaho. As soon as it did actually have verifiable occurrence here in Idaho, we able to respond inside of almost 60 seconds with that press release going out to the public. It just gave us the ability to really use some of our pre-planning tools, get some of those things in motion, get all the approvals that we needed to make a good informed response very rapidly.

IR:

Can you tell me a little bit more about the partners who are involved here?

Houck:

It’s certainly not just the Secretary of State’s office that you see around here. We really appreciate all the partners that do bring resources to bear here on election day, because these are folks who their agencies are loaning to us for the day effectively. We have folks from the Department of Homeland Security and the Cybersecurity Infrastructure Security Administration. We have contacts remotely into the intelligence community back on the East Coast in D.C. and other locations.

Multiple state partners across other states, we’re talking in chat rooms with those other states. Obviously, our county clerks, because we have a live chat going with all forty-four counties throughout the day, so there’s access to this room for the counties.

We work very closely with the courts, so we have representatives from the courts here so that we can see if things are happening. That’s another possible attack vector, coming in through the courts. You have a lot of our clerks of court in the smaller counties that are directly related to the election, or in some cases even the same official as an election official.

IR:

Here in Idaho, the foundation of our election system is the paper ballots. However, are there any cybersecurity issues particular to Idaho that you are watching?

Houck:

We watch a very broad spectrum of cybersecurity. One of the very first points of cybersecurity actually comes from physical security, and it’s access. We’re watching access to our our systems. We’re watching load levels on our systems. One of the biggest trends this year in the election cycle and in the months leading up to the election cycle – both in elections and not in the election space – was DDoS attacks. We saw that theme across the country, we saw it in the airports recently. We were watching for DDoS attacks, we did see some states experiencing some issues today. We were watching all of ours. I think our highest peak server load today got up to around 80%, which is actually very acceptable. We’re running closer to 40% now.

The election system itself is a very isolated, very secure and very specific system, but elections as a whole takes place across a very broad array variety of systems, including our website. I mean, if somebody were to come in and deface the Secretary of State’s website and put misinformation on the surface of that – while they’d be isolated away from anything near the voter registration system, or any of the other components of what we would call technically the election system – it would still have an impact on the elections and certainly on the confidence of voters here.

IR:

Is there any thing else that you think our viewers should know about the Secretary of State’s role in these local elections?

Houck:

I think a big key to understand is that one of the biggest security functions that we have in the state of Idaho, and in the United States, is the decentralization of our national elections system. The Constitution originated this decentralized system across fifty states where the federal government does not run the election, and in a very similar manner here in Idaho, the Secretary of State does not run the election.

We have forty-four independent elected county clerks that are doing a phenomenal job at keeping their space running the way that they need it to go, with with the regulations and the rules – as we say it, the guardrails on the highway that the Secretary of State puts on, within which they then choose the lanes. We’ve got forty-four county clerks that are doing a great job of doing that. Our job is predominantly to try and resource them the best that we can and then support them in that effort.

Collectively, Idaho’s got one of the best systems of doing so in the country. That’s why we’ve had opportunities to share that with a lot of other states.

Logan Finney, Idaho Reports:

Obviously, election day is a big undertaking for you. Can you tell me what it takes to run an election at the Ada County level?

Trent Tripple, Chief Deputy Ada County Clerk:

Well, our clerk Phil McGrane often describes this day as the largest single event in the state of Idaho. We invite 300,000 of our closest friends to come hang out and vote. We have 1,300 workers that are working precincts and central scanning here at the headquarters for the day. We will be working all day long and all night long to bring the results of the election to everyone.

IR:

Could you tell me the size of your permanent election staff and how much that grows in the ramp up to election day?

Tripple:

We have 11 permanent election staff. About fourty-five days out, we start bringing on temporary employees, and then we augment them with clerks as well on election day. We also train several folks that work as poll workers. They’re the people you go to church with and the people you see at the grocery store. They’re neighbors from the community who want to just help out with elections. We train them, recruit them, and they work for us for the day as deputized clerks for the county.

IR:

What does it take to get a random person who walks in the door with an interest in volunteering educated to be a poll worker?

Tripple:

Well, they go through training depending on what type of job they’re going to do. We have district judges, chief judges, assistant chief judges, and poll workers. It’s generally a several hour long session of training that they have to go through. If they’re first time workers, they’ll go through more extensive training. If they’ve been doing this for us for years, we have some refresher training that we put them through.

IR:

When it comes to the actual ballots themselves, there has been a lot of attention locally and nationwide on election integrity the last couple of years. When you receive an absentee ballot, what does the process look like to make sure it’s correct and valid and legal, and what sort of verification methods do you use?

Tripple:

The important part of the absentee process is really looking at it from the beginning to the end. We don’t send absentee ballots out to anybody that doesn’t personally request them, so that’s the first part. We have registered voter rolls that verify someone is eligible to receive a ballot. They actually have to make a step, a positive action towards requesting an absentee ballot. We then verify that they’re eligible to have one. We send them the ballot and then, of course, they vote and send it back any number of ways to us.

Once it’s received by us – either through the Postal Service, a drop box or someone physically handing those off – they go into what we call the dual custody role. They aren’t handled unless we have two people watching the ballot. They go into secure storage while they’re waiting to be processed.

We have a very large processing machine that we had to bring on during the presidential election in 2020 because we had such a large number of absentee ballots. That helps us to date stamp them and image them. Then we can take that image of the signature and compare that to our online voter ID system and make sure that they match. We have trained people that are experts in signature verification and identifying fraud if there is to be any.

Once those are received, they wait in a secure storage – that’s under camera surveillance as well – until we open them. We start opening them the day before the election, so yesterday we started opening those absentee ballots and then we process the ballot and vote it just like someone had showed up at a precinct.

IR:

If you needed to, how accurately could you could go back and retrieve a specific ballot from a specific precinct?

Tripple:

We could for the absentees, if there’s ever a question on an absentee ballot. We have voters calling all the time wanting to verify that we have their ballot. The way that we sort them and store them in the storage unit, it is very easy for us to go back and look at the physical ballot to ensure that we received someone’s ballot.

IR:

There’s an interesting juxtaposition between the secret ballot, where someone gets to vote and no one knows who they voted for, versus the tracking of their absentee ballot with their name and their signature and verifying their identity. What sort of secrecy measures do you guys take when actually pulling apart absentee envelopes and sorting everything?

Tripple:

That’s a great question. We go to great lengths to ensure that the ballot is indeed secret. When we open an absentee ballot, there is a secrecy sleeve inside that prevents the person from connecting who is being voted for on that ballot with the name on the actual absentee ballot envelope. Once we have separated the envelope from the privacy sleeve with the ballot inside, we turn that over to another worker so there’s no way for them to make the connection before we pull that ballot out of the secrecy sleeve.

If we open a ballot and there isn’t a secrecy sleeve inside, there’s only a ballot, then we turn that over to a board that goes through the process of opening them in a very deliberate process, not looking at the outer envelope while they pull the ballot out, and then we process that so that no one ever knows whose vote is tied to which registered voter.

IR:

After that, all of the ballots go through scanning and tabulating. Can you walk me through that system?

Tripple:

Here in Idaho, we’re very fortunate that the paper ballot is the official record. What we’re doing when we’re scanning the ballots is we’re scanning an image of the ballot, and then there’s a program that tallies whatever that marking is on those ballots onto a secure, hardened V-drive, which is much like a thumb drive inside the secure scanner and the network. What we do is we pull all those together and tabulate. That’s how we’re able to get results out within hours and days of an election, rather than weeks if we were to have to hand count all of those ballots.

There’s an extensive process that we go through validating and verifying that the machine is reading properly. We invite the public to come watch that. It’s called a public logic and accuracy test, where we test the equipment before it is ever used to scan any ballots for that election. The same process goes for scanners used at the precincts on election day. So whether it’s an absentee ballot, an early voter ballot in person, or an Election Day ballot, they all go through that same scan and then those ballots are tabulated today. They aren’t tabulated before today.

IR:

You referenced you guys got the big sorting machine during the 2020 presidential election. That primary in Idaho was unique because it was all absentee ballots. That year during a special session, the legislature passed a law to allow counties to open absentee envelopes seven days in advance of the general election to get everything ready. How much of a help was that in 2020? Has that provision not being extended past the 2020 election caused any issues?

Tripple:

The numbers that we were dealing with in the 2020 presidential election were massive. I mean, we have 300,000 registered voters in Ada County and 90% of those people vote in a presidential election. You can imagine the amount of absentee ballots that we were going to have to process. To put that in perspective, we’re doing a general election right now and we’re getting, I think, a sixth of the amount of absentee ballots that we had from the presidential.

We can generally get through about 45,000 to 50,000 absentee ballots in a day if we scan nonstop. We’re working hard to meet those deadlines of being able to get results out this evening or early in the morning, but it would be a great benefit to us if we didn’t have to wait until today to start scanning them. I would love to see in the future the Legislature consider allowing us to open and scan those ballots – not tally them, we wouldn’t tally them until election day – but at least scan them and have them prepared for the tally on election day. That would alleviate a great strain on us. Seeing the way that absentee voting is trending, that’s just going to be something that becomes bigger and bigger and bigger for us.

IR:

The forty-four elected county clerks run their own elections at the local level, and the Secretary of State has a more supervisory role. What have your communications with the Secretary of State’s office been like today?

Tripple:

Today we have had very little because we’ve had very little problems. If we’ve had problems, then we do tend to reach out to the Secretary of State more often, which is a good thing. But all of that communication really takes place before today. There’s directives that come down from the Secretary of State, procedures and policies that they would like to see in place for election day. We communicate multiple times a day leading up to the election so that things run smoothly on the day. But if things were to go sideways today, you’d better believe we’d be in communication with them.

IR:

Is there anything else election integrity or election security related that you think our viewers need to know?

Tripple:

You know, we try really hard here in Idaho, specifically here in Ada County, to go to great lengths to ensure people that their election process is secure. We’re very open. We’re very transparent. We want people to come in and see what we do. There’s no secrets. The hardest thing for us is dealing with the national narrative of things that are happening in other places. We can talk until we’re blue in the face and tell people that we’re doing the right things, but it really does help when people are able to see us doing the right things. We hope that as they participate in the voting process – whether it be absentee, early voting, or on election day – they see that we’re doing everything possible to carry out a safe, free and secure election.

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