Elkhart County officials say local election system secure

The indictments, according to The Associated Press, revolve around a social media campaign to influence the election, not manipulation of election equipment or voter information or even election results.

Those conspiracy theory scenarios are something Elkhart County officials said can’t happen here.

“For actually messing with votes he would need a massive amount of people,” said Chad Clingerman, voter registration/election board office manager in reference to Russian President Vladimir Putin. “Which is going to be get found out.”

Elkhart County Clerk Wendy Hudson said such a conspiracy is out of the question because the conspirators would need to gain access to voting equipment and voting systems on the local, state and national levels.

“When I get questions from people wanting to know about whether hackers can change their votes, the answer is, our voting machines are never connected to the internet,” Hudson said. “So nobody can sit at home in their pajamas and hack into our voting machines. It can’t be done.”

She acknowledged that voting machines can be hacked by having them in hand, but even the fastest hacker who tried such a thing at a recent DEFCON Hacking Conference needed a half hour to get into the operating system of just one voting machine.

“For this to happen on election day they would have to have a half an hour access to a voting machine in front of a nine-member bipartisan board,” Hudson said of poll workers. “And they aren’t going to let that happen.”

So why is there a persistent concern about election security among some members of the public?

“Because they are reading these hyped stories out there on media,” Hudson said.

She said voters should know that the county’s 300 plus touch-screen election machines are locked in a secure location with only a few clerk’s office officials having access. And then testing is done on the machines before an election to make sure they are functioning properly and registering ballot selections accurately.

“On election morning the poll workers have to verify that seals are in place on all the voting machines, which shows they have not been tampered with from the time we prepped them for election until election morning,” Hudson said.

Poll workers also run a “zero tape” on each machine, which confirms no votes have been logged into the machines before the polls open, according to Hudson.

Clingerman added that a few machines are picked at random to run sample ballot returns to make sure they register results correctly.

VOTER REGISTRATION

About 120,000 people are registered to vote in Elkhart County, according to Clingerman, and county officials are charged with maintaining accurate lists of those people. And there are rules and procedures in place to make sure a person voting is the person registered.

“When someone doesn’t show up in the poll book the poll workers are supposed to call voter registration. They have the actual records and they can go through to see if the person is registered. If so, the person can get an official ballot on election day. If not they can get a provisional ballot,” Hudson said.

Those provisional ballots are then collected and shortly after election day the bipartisan election board examines the person’s registration information to see if the ballot should be counted.

According to Hudson, most such examinations are due to people registering in a county where they should not, such as college students who may be registered locally where they live and then join a voter registration drive and sign up to vote where they go to college. Such redundancies do happen, according to Hudson, but there is no fraud intended. She added that she couldn’t recall any intentional local voter fraud occurring during her eight years as clerk and another eight years as assistant clerk.

Clingerman said the voter registration rolls are reviewed for accuracy after every general election per federal law. He said most adjustments to those rolls are made because of people moving out of the election district where they initially registered. People who have died are also removed, but those names are routinely deleted after the state health department gives the voter registration office the names of the deceased, he said.