King County officials ready for the challenge of record-setting election
Nov 3, 2020, 8:28 AM | Updated: Oct 7, 2024, 9:14 am
Washington ballots being received and tallied. (AP Photo/Elaine Thompson, File)
(AP Photo/Elaine Thompson, File)
As King County continues to receive record-breaking numbers of ballots, officials feel confident that they’re ready for any number of challenges they might face now that Election Day has arrived.
“We’re up for it,” King County Elections head Julie Wise told KIRO Radio’s Dave Ross. “Our voters are up to it, and we know that our partners at USPS and across the state are up for it.”
The county is preparing for 90% voter turnout when it’s all said and done, which would total about 1.3 million ballots, with plans in place to ensure those votes remain secure throughout the process of getting tallied.
“We’ve got a lot of security measures, whether it’s business security or cyber security,” Wise described.
That includes “thousand-pound half-inch thick steel tanks made locally” acting as drop boxes, screwed into the concrete below with eight-inch bolts. Ballots inside are collected by trained employees, who then record them on air-gapped computers not connected to internet to avoid attempts to hack the process.
Where to find a ballot dropbox before Election Day 2020
Anyone physically present at sites where ballots are recorded must go through biometric security with a badge, in secure areas that even Wise herself doesn’t have access to as the county’s director of elections.
There have also been numerous attempts to hack the state’s election systems, none of which have been successful. That’s a process that Wise describes as “24/7, 365.”
“It’s not ‘check the box and we’re one and done,'” she noted. “We have to keep that vigilance up every single day.”
Local ballot boxes close at 8 p.m. on Tuesday and the Washington Secretary of State’s Office releases the first batch of election results soon after. As of late Monday in Washington, over 3.5 million ballots have been turned in by the state’s voters, totaling 72.7%. At that same point ahead of the 2016 election, 52.3% of ballots had been turned in.
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