dChan - Q Origins Project Archive

Check Gabriel Sterling in charge of voting in Georgia

Q: Executive Director of Common Cause Georgia Aunna Dennis - I’m wondering when it comes to having more paper ballots at precincts for election day, are you all gonna have more allocation that’s not just 10% of a voting population or are gonna expand that to 15% to 20 to 25% after what we saw in June with the delays, extensions, some precincts not having enough ballots, I’m wondering what type of provisions are you all doing at a state level to make sure counties have enough supplies in the form of paper ballots for election day?

[50:40] Gabriel Sterling: Well we’ve, the rule is 10%, but we discovered unfortunately that some people interpreted 10% to be 0% which was obviously the worst possible outcome, and we are working with them all on logistics plans, we have some specific counties where we are going to be doing some special reviews with and they have to give us their plans on…getting those deployed properly to the right place, because emergency ballots have, well they’re precinct based, you can’t just print the ballot for your county or the districts that you’re…you have to have a precinct based thing, so you have to make sure to have all those.

And one of the things that we did when we purchased the entire system for the state was that every county will be given a mobile ballot printer and with that they can…the whole point of that is you’ll have the 10% in that location. Let’s say worst things happen, everything goes to crap, power goes out, it floods the room, you can go to the county office, and the bigger counties have multiples of these obviously and they can print more and there’s going to be a rover plan to make sure those are put in, the plan is those are belt and suspenders and one thing that was very frustrating for us at the state level is that if people would follow the rules and do the things you’re supposed to do a lot of the stuff wouldn’t have happened.

And what we really discovered was, by losing the institutional knowledge of our older poll workers, because the average age of our poll worker is 70 so we obviously lost a lot of those people for their own safety and rightfully so, didn’t go, it wasn’t the equipment it was the election process because people didn’t understand. And even people who did understand somewhat, they were treating the emergency ballots like provisional ballots. So they were taking it, they putting it in the sleeves, they were signing all that stuff, when really with an emergency ballot, if you’ve ever hand worked an emergency ballot, you put that it in the scanner, it gets counted just like the BMD ballot does.

So they were losing a lot of time with that process, we’ve been talking to the counties, doing a lot of training around this and we’re also deploying techs to all of the umm (gulp) locations on the off chance something goes wrong…Not goes wrong…because essentially what happened in all the 50 thousand pieces of equipment we had put out in the field, 14 were taken out. What happened was, people put an encoder in wrong or backwards or upside down or didn’t hold the button on the EPS down for 5 seconds, so the equipment itself all did exactly what it was supposed to do, if they turned it on right. And that was our bigger problem and the paper poll books which is the other thing we need to have, that’s been a standard practice to have those in every precinct for 18 years for 18 years so nearly every county has that one down at least, but it always comes up but it’s almost always there.

We’re working with them to make sure they have A – enough ballots on the 10% rule by itself. And the other thing they have to worry about is not just 10% for a polling location, you need to have 10% per precinct. Like in Fulton County, there’s four or five precincts there, so they have to have 10% of each type, that’s really thousands of ballots. And the rules around handling those to make sure you give people the right ones.