Important procedures are changing at the Anchorage Election Office for this municipal election that may address some of the concerns raised by election observers in years past, when volunteers watching the counting of ballots found fault with protocols established by Municipal Clerk Barb Jones, who retires in June.
The election ends April 4, and in addition to candidates for Assembly and School Board, there are three pages of propositions.
Here are some of the changes implemented:
Signature verification. In the past, the paid signature verifiers sat next to each other and verified voter signatures unilaterally, working individually. Now, two people will have to agree that signatures match or don’t match with what the Municipality has on file. If the two verifiers don’t agree, they discuss their different conclusions and continue until they come to a conclusion. If they agree that the signature matches, the ballot envelope can proceed to the next step, where the ballot gets separated from the envelope.
Green bins: When the voter signature is verified, the computer can then read the ballot. In the past, all the ballots went into green bins, which meant they were ready to be counted. But the election officials in past years had no idea how many ballots were in each bin, and numerous election workers had access to the locked cages where the ballot bins were kept. Now, every single green bin will have a printed sheet of paper attached to it that has the exact count of the ballots in that bin. Two human counters will count how many ballots are going into the bin, and how many envelopes have been separated from the ballots. Everyone with access to the cage must be accompanied by another employee who has similar access. This was a big issue with election observers in recent years.
Fax votes: The Municipal Election Office has never kept track of the number of faxed votes that were received. Now, it will be tracking those votes every day.
Computers don’t see red: The ballot reading machines do not see the color red. The bubbles that voters fill in are red. Observers were not able to tell where stray marks on ballots were, because the screen that observers were required to use did not show the red bubble outlines. Now, there is a new place where observers can go and look at the ballots themselves, so they can verify where the marks are on the ballot. Jones did not allow people to see these ballots in prior years.
Notification: In years past, Jones would not tell observers when the adjuration process would start, but miraculously some candidates, like Forrest Dunbar and Chris Constant, would show up right before ballot adjudication started. Observers for other candidates had to stay at in the building at all times to wait for when Jones would start an adjudication session. Now, the election office has established and published a schedule that gives the times for adjudication, signature verification, and sorting.
Ballots arrived in most Anchorage voters’ mailboxes this week and already the ballots are coming into the election office. You can watch the various cameras around the building at this YouTube channel.
