Your election integrity and transparency questions answered by an expert

Election integrity is a hot-button issue every election cycle, which is why Snohomish County Auditor Garth Fell hopes to assuage concerns and increase transparency for voters.

Voters in Washington have become accustomed to mail-in voting, but many have questions. Sometimes, they’re complex questions. Other times, they’re as simple as wondering what exactly happens to their ballot once it’s mailed in.

“We’ve got an arrangement with the post office where they deliver the ballots to our office here at 5:30 in the morning and then the first thing we do is run them down equipment to read the barcode on the outside of the envelope, which has the voter’s ID for that particular ballot for this particular election,” Fell told “The Jason Rantz Show” on KTTH. “And we are crediting the voter with having returned a ballot as well as we clip the signature, which can then be used in the signature verification process.”

But what happens if your signature gets challenged?

“Within 24 hours, we’re mailing out a letter to that voter with instructions on how they can resolve their signature issue,” Fell said. “We also follow up with phone calls to any phone numbers that we have on file for the voter, and we’ll even do a text message through our online system to text voters if they signed up for text alerts.”

Fell is hosting a series of information sessions called Elections Explained designed to provide answers to questions about topics like voting procedures, ballot processing and election security.

How widespread is voter fraud in our elections?

Another issue that creates suspicion and consternation amongst voters is the amount of time it takes to get votes counted.

“One piece that we can’t control is on-time ballots due to postmarking and so that’ll continue to be a sizable number of ballots that come back that we get the next morning, even if we were to be working through the night,” Fell said.

Fell also knows that voter fraud is a concern for many. While he was reticent to use the term “fraud” (which he believes implies intent), he did acknowledge there are irregularities from time to time.

“There are situations each election where we’ll get a ballot back that’s signed by somebody else, not the voter, and we investigate those situations and forward them on to our prosecuting attorney’s office when it appears that someone may have knowingly signed on behalf of somebody else,” Fell conceded. “And they do an investigation and determine what action to take at this point.”

The next Elections Explained session will be Saturday, September 21, at noon at Stanwood Library. But if you can’t make it, here is an extensive two-part interview with Auditor Fell:

Listen to The Jason Rantz Show on weekday afternoons from 3-7 p.m. on KTTH 770 AM (HD Radio 97.3 FM HD-Channel 3). Subscribe to the podcast here. Follow Jason on X, formerly known as Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.