For many voters, casting a ballot marks the end of the election cycle. For Orange County Registrar of Voters Neal Kelley, Election Day is just the beginning of the next phase of his job.
With more than 1.5 million ballots cast on or before Nov. 3, Orange County’s turnout stands at nearly 85%, and as of Monday, Nov. 9, Kelley had about 30,000 ballots left to tally. Later this week, he’ll begin checking his work.
Protests in Michigan, Colorado and other states have been taking place since Election Day, led by supporters of President Donald Trump who assert that various types of fraud and cheating caused him to lose. On Monday, about 300 demonstrators gathered outside the OC Registrar of Voters’ Santa Ana office to question a voting system they allege is corrupt, though rally organizer Alan Hostetter said they were not protesting Orange County’s results.
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People lined Grand Avenue in Santa Ana, CA during a pro-Trump election integrity rally at the Orange County Registrar of Voters offices in Santa Ana, CA on Monday, November 9, 2020. The rally was calling attention to what organizers see as a broken national election process. They were not protesting the O.C. Registrars office. (Photo by Paul Bersebach, Orange County Register/SCNG)
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A worker looks over a ballot at the Orange County Registrar in Santa Ana, CA, on Wednesday, November 4, 2020. (Photo by Jeff Gritchen, Orange County Register/SCNG)
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Alan Hostetter speaks during a pro-Trump election integrity rally he organized at the Orange County Registrar of Voters offices in Santa Ana, CA on Monday, November 9, 2020. They were not protesting the O.C. Registrars office, he said, but instead the national election process. (Photo by Paul Bersebach, Orange County Register/SCNG)
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Workers process ballots at the Orange County Registrar in Santa Ana, CA, on Wednesday, November 4, 2020. (Photo by Jeff Gritchen, Orange County Register/SCNG)
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About 300 people participated in a pro-Trump election integrity rally at the Orange County Registrar of Voters offices in Santa Ana, CA on Monday, November 9, 2020. The rally was calling attention to what organizers see as a broken national election process. They were not protesting the O.C. Registrars office. (Photo by Paul Bersebach, Orange County Register/SCNG)
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Observers watch as signatures are checked on ballots as they are processed at the Orange County Registrar in Santa Ana, CA, on Wednesday, November 4, 2020. Third-party observers on hand to make sure the process is fair and doesn’t disadvantage a candidate or measure. When counting started Wednesday, about 211,000 ballots were left to county, plus whatever comes in the mail by the deadline. (Photo by Jeff Gritchen, Orange County Register/SCNG)
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Rosemary Robinson participates in a pro-Trump election integrity rally at the Orange County Registrar of Voters offices in Santa Ana, CA on Monday, November 9, 2020. The rally was calling attention to what organizers see as a broken national election process. They were not protesting the O.C. Registrars office. (Photo by Paul Bersebach, Orange County Register/SCNG)
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Workers check signatures on ballots as they are processed at the Orange County Registrar in Santa Ana, CA, on Wednesday, November 4, 2020. (Photo by Jeff Gritchen, Orange County Register/SCNG)
One complaint from Hostetter and voters in other cities alleges that some election computer systems “flipped” votes from Trump to his opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden. (Officials in one Michigan county where this was suspected said that a clerical error and failure to update software resulted in a mistake that has been fixed.)
While no one suggested OC’s system gave votes to the wrong candidates, the auditing Kelley will do is designed to find exactly this type of error.
For decades, county elections officials in California have followed elections by auditing 1% of precinct results, which means recounting those ballots by hand and checking the outcome to make sure it matches machine-counted results.
Kelley also plans to use a “risk-limiting audit,” which uses software to randomly select ballots for election workers to fetch and hand-count. If the manual count results aren’t proportional to the overall machine tallies in a contest, more ballots are pulled from the stacks and counted.
It starts with randomly chosen people rolling a 10-sided die (like the kind used to play Dungeons & Dragons) to come up with a number that’s plugged into an algorithm, which then tells election workers which ballots to count by hand. The software used is open-source and publicly available, so anyone can see how it’s designed to work.
“This is determining, did the (ballot) scanners work correctly, were there issues related to the bar codes on the ballots” or some other irregularity in the machine tally that warrants a closer look, Kelley said. “The whole point of this is to have strong statistical evidence that what you produced, this result, is correct.”
While it’s nearly impossible to have a 100% error-free election, Kelley said the auditing is designed to ensure the errors, if any, did not affect the outcome of any contests. It doesn’t detect voter registration fraud or ineligible people on the voter rolls, but election officials have other ways to check that – and anyone can report those concerns to the Orange County District Attorney or California Secretary of State.
Election results and ballot counts have been a focus of public discussion and media attention in the past week, but Kelley said he’s had significantly fewer people show up to observe the process than he did in the 2018 midterms.
The volume of calls with questions or allegations of irregularities has gone up, but “it’s all the same things we’ve heard before,” he said, such as concerns with a ballot collection site in Westminster that had been previously reported or people who thought they hadn’t registered to vote, but got a mail ballot anyway.
So far, Kelley said, “There’s nothing systemic. There’s nothing that’s alarming me.”
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