Tour of Davis County Election Center
The Government Operations Interim Committee toured the Davis County Election Center on the morning of October 16th
Synopsis and comment:
Clerk Brian McKinzie led a tour of about twenty legislators, administrators and citizens in the election-center entrance-room at Farmington. Started with a voter registration discussion.
ID validation is done when registering voters or at 1st time voting.
2nd level examination: Voter Registration Data is compared to Department of Motor Vehicles data. DMV data is based on two forms of significant documentation.
3rd check is to validate the address of the registrant as residential address.
4th: Clerks communicate by-mail to the listed address to corroborate the registration application.
Protected voter-registrant groups were initially created in ~2013 then changes were made in ~2020. Some people were grandfathered into the ‘Withheld’ category in 2013.
The 63G GRAMA section says Election officers shall release the names of petition signers except those that are ‘protected’. Admittedly, this conflicts with 20A Election Code declaration that petitioner-names will be available to election candidates.
Committee members may have future talks about whether or not the withheld category should exist.
Committee members may have future conversation about cure lists, as well.
Moving into the main area of the election center…
Talk about foreign entities (Iran, North Korea & China) that may want to impact our elections. Cyber attacks are common for Utah IT.
Brian McKinzie and one other Davis County employee are certified ES&S technicians and can open the ES&S machines. Other counties don’t necessarily have certified technicians. Clerk is very confident in the security of Davis IT and ES&S, and a eloquent proponent of voting with computers.
Could add to next years study some type of physical security done by an entity using jammers or sniffers. Clerk Brian McKinzie says that he welcomes tests for wireless mischief. Call to make an appointment and he will personally assist. (Test hardware can not touch the machine.)
The Agillis sorter is not connected to the internet but is hard-wired to the other machines. Red cables means internal communications… not networked outside. Blue cables mean the cable connects to the outside.
The signatures are uploaded from the ‘VISTA’ Voter Registration database.
The office ensures that each ballot is an authentic valid ballot, is serialized and issued by their county, that the voter is registered and they make sure that that voter has not already voted by interfacing with VISTA vote-history records.
The term ‘counting’ refers to ballot reception, signature checking and removing ballots from the envelopes. Tabulating is the term used for getting the election results.
The Agillis machine receives its address information from the state VR database as protected by physical disconnects. Weber County uses a firewall with help from IT, per Clerk Ricky Hatch.
‘Challenged voter’ provisions allow a voter to receive and vote a provisional ballot. The voter is given tracking information and the ballot is segregated. The election officers check out the situation later with VISTA and by examining the signatures. The voter receives a paper with instructions when they cast their ballot to find out what happens to it via an online portal after adjudication of the provisional ballot or a letter in the mail if being queried about attempting to vote twice.
Vendor specific media-sticks are used to transfer data. The sticks for the ExpressVotes don’t work in the DS450’s & vice-versa. Encrypted. Passwords.
Ballots are logged into an arrival log on receipt… where they came from, when did they arrive and who checked them in. On removal of the privacy-tab & signature-check they are date-stamped. Drop box video is kept until 31 Dec of the year-of-the-election or end of contest period.
Chain-of-custody question: Davis contracts with Runbeck Election Services. Printed ballots are shipped with GPS from Arizona to SLC. Runbeck has proprietary internal chain-of-custody. The question was asked how we can get the chain-of-custody at Runbeck: Can’t because they are a third party. Legislator suggested state code be used to direct Contracts to include access to printing-contractor chain-of-custody. “Chain of custody, from our perspective, picks back up as soon as we pick those up from the post office or from drop-boxes” (tacit admission there are very large out-of-custody time-periods for mailed ballots).
All temporary petition workers took oaths and received training in Davis County. Persons may get them by filing a records request for the oaths. Note to reader: You should obtain the entire document, not snippets or portions… do not settle for less than the whole document. Make sure the signatures are not redacted as they indicate agreement on the part of the oathtaker and they authenticate witness to the act on the part the administrator & observers.
Similar ballot-processing is used in each county and across the states.
Brian McKinzke says you can do elections fast, cheap or accurate… implying that hand-counting in precincts is fast & cheap but inaccurate.
Note to reader: Assertions of accuracy with the current computerized system when all the canvass-certificate-statements from the counties and from the State that do not vouch for accuracy is a nothing but a self indictment… not to mention that precinct counts have never been conducted side-by-side with the current system. Precinct counts would have to be done with every election to prevent fraud because with a simple instructional change an electronic computer code can switch from integrity-mode to weasel-mode.
At the same time that Brian says that hand-counting-is-fast he implied both methods are equally slow (to get to the canvass-date).
Note to the reader: This is a nothing-burger. It is a gaslighting argument with canvass being two weeks after the elections regardless of type of election-structure, and he conveniently did not mention that with hand-counts the ballots are all processed on election-night except for military & overseas whereas with machines it is a week of continuous receipt, checking and processing of multitudes of mailed-ballots and attendant opportunities for fencing and mishandling as seen this year with the ballots crossing the state boundary to Nevada before belatedly trundling back to Utah via the US Postal Service.
Clark County, Nevada canvass: mail-in voter fraud… conversation for another time.
Yesterday’s report on signatures for Cox… serious reasons for concern… another time.