By Jack Armstrong
On Wednesday, Oct. 23 and Thursday, Oct. 24, the Boulder County Clerk and Reporter’s office opened their doors to prospective voters interested in how the county’s ballot processing system works. A handful of residents arrived for a tour of the facility, which walked them through how votes are securely processed through the county during the voting season, lasting after results are called on election night.
“We’re here in the wee hours of the morning on election night, but votes are tallied well past then,” Mircalla Wozniak said at the beginning of the tour. Wozniak is a communications specialist for the Boulder County Clerk and Recorder and led the tour of the county’s voting facility.
Residents were accompanied by security throughout the tour of the facility, which itself is made more secure through key card access points stationed before each section of the Clerk and Recorder’s office.
In addition to more than 300,000 residents, Boulder County exists on a statewide system where, since the 2020 election, voters can cast their ballot from anywhere in the state. If they’re a resident of a Colo. county outside of where they dropped off their ballot, it will be delivered to the proper location.
“It’s part of what makes Colorado such a secure voting system,” Wozniak said.
Led through the brutalist architecture of the Clerk and Recorder’s Office, Wozniak began the tour with the sorting machines. A sorting machine stationed on the first floor sorts votes by Boulderites’ signatures and identification methods. While the sorting machine confirms whether a vote has a legitimate verification method, trained bipartisan workers across the hall are tasked with verifying signatures written on ballots by comparing them with ones in the county’s database.
When asked whether the signature verifiers could introduce bias into the mix if they saw the signature of someone they knew, Wozniak responded, “while it’s never come up, bipartisan workers are at every key point of the ballot security process.”
Once verified, the ballots are stacked and transported to the hands of more verifiers on the second floor. To check if the ballots have any imperfections like food stains, notes in the margins or crushed bugs, verifiers are dealt ballots to scan in a random draw around a table.
If a ballot has an imperfection, bipartisan workers will cast a vote on the voter’s behalf based on the answers. Ballots without imperfections are tallied and entered into an internal computer system that organizes the votes.
“Votes are free floating in the system until the night of the election, when we task the program to run analysis of its data to determine outcomes of the vote,” Wozniak said.
At the end of the tour, Wozniak told Radio 1190 that what makes Boulder’s facility unique is “the security, bipartisan oversight and the continuous education featured at our facility.”