New report from Taking Back the Republic

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Introduction

Citizen trust in election systems is essential to voter participation and confidence in election outcomes. Election procedures must not only be secure and accurate, but must also be transparent enough to allow meaningful public verification of election results. The principles of Auditability, Ballot Secrecy, and Chain of Custody form the foundation of election integrity and are necessary for citizens to independently verify that election outcomes accurately reflect the will of the voters.

The modern practice of allowing regular (non-provisional) ballots to be cast at any countywide vote center has created significant challenges to all three principles. While countywide voting centers were adopted to increase convenience, they have also eliminated the last voting option that inherently guaranteed ballot secrecy—in-precinct voting on Election Day. As a result, election administrators have been forced to redact a variety of election records to prevent the public from reconciling individual voters with their ballots, something that should not be possible under state and federal voting system standards.

The Problem

The need to redact election records has created a conflict between transparency and ballot secrecy. While ballot secrecy must always be protected, the resulting redactions prevent meaningful public examination of election records, hinder recounts, compromise audits, and weaken the chain of custody associated with precinct returns. Election records that should be available for verification become difficult or impossible to reconcile, limiting the public’s ability to independently confirm election accuracy.

These concerns stem from the fact that countywide vote centers break the traditional relationship between a voter’s assigned precinct and the location where the ballot is cast. Precinct-level reporting remains a legal requirement, yet many states have authorized the practice of casting ballots throughout the county and later attribute them back to precincts through electronic mechanisms rather than through direct physical accountability at the precinct level.

The result is an election system that is more difficult to audit, more difficult to recount, and more dependent upon electronic reconciliation processes than traditional precinct-based voting systems ever needed to be.

A Simple Solution

Fortunately, restoring precinct-based voting does not require replacing existing voting equipment or reducing voter access. Modern electronic poll books already identify voters and generate the correct ballot style at check-in. The technology necessary to support precinct-based voting while maintaining countywide voter access already exists in nearly every county.

Quick note: This approach assumes the use of EXSISTING polling locations, and does not require the acquisition of new polling locations necessarily. Precinct-based voting means simply casting all ballots of a precinct together, whether regularly in a ballot box, or provisionally to be examined and sorted later. Voting “BY PRECINCT” simply requires precincts be assigned to one polling location so as to achieve the goal of casting precinct ballots together.

Under this approach, voters appearing at their assigned precinct would receive a regular ballot. Voters appearing at a location other than their assigned precinct would receive a provisional ballot containing the proper ballot style associated with their home precinct. There is no technical reason for an eligible voter to receive the wrong ballot style using modern election systems.

The only significant procedural change would be restoring the use of a hard-copy precinct poll book at each polling location containing the list of voters assigned to that location. Election workers would use this paper poll book to determine whether a voter receives a regular ballot or a provisional ballot.