TRANSCRIPT:
This transcript was edited for length and clarity.
Hernandez: Your office is in charge of overseeing all elections in Rhode Island. Just briefly, what steps has the state taken to ensure that this year’s elections process is safe and secure?
Amore: We’re one of three entities that is involved in making sure that our elections are safe and secure. And those three entities, the Board of Elections, the Rhode Island Department of State, and the local boards of canvassers, and the clerks who work in those offices, have been preparing for this election, in and around security issues, for over a year. We have constant communication with our state police, our National Guard, our partners on the federal level in cybersecurity and elsewhere on both physical security and cybersecurity threats, and there’s constant communication with all three levels of Rhode Island election administration.
Hernandez: Just to remind people, what’s the deadline for absentee or mail-in ballots to be received in order so that they’re counted?
Amore: So we’re an 8 p.m. mail ballot state. We are not a postmark state. So you need to have your mail ballot at the drop box or at a polling location by 8 p.m. on Election Day, Nov. 5, and then that’ll be counted. Anything that arrives after that will not be counted.
Hernandez: Just briefly, I wanted to get a sense of how election officials ensure that those absentee or mail-in ballots come from a legitimate voter and they haven’t been tampered with. How do we know they haven’t been tampered with?
Amore: We have a robust process and this takes place both on the local side and the Board of Election side. The Rhode Island Department of State mails out these mail ballots. And so every voter is identified through a barcode to their voter identification number. So that envelope is connected to that voter and that voter had to request that mail ballot. And that request process either went through an online process through our office where they punched in their Rhode Island identification or driver’s license, or it went through the local canvassing board’s process, which is a paper application that is signed and then that signature is cross-checked with the voter information. When that ballot is returned to the Board of Elections two folks will take a look at that envelope and compare the signature on that envelope to the signatures on file. If both of those folks do not agree, and these are either two unaffiliated folks or either Democrat or Republican, if one of those persons thinks that that signature does not match, that ballot is not counted until it is cured, potentially, and it’s cured through someone proving who they are. And so that is the process. And there’s a machine at the Board of Elections that separates the ballot from the envelope after it has been approved by those two signature verifiers. And so no one knows your ballot is associated with your name. Human beings are not involved in that process.
Hernandez: I wonder, too, how the state makes sure those voter registration lists are up to date so that no one who’s not authorized to vote isn’t voting.
Amore: Sure, so we have a really robust cross-check and reporting system in place for our voter registration list maintenance. And that includes reports from the Rhode Island Department of Health, vital statistics as to whether or not someone has passed away. That’s reinforced by data that we get from the Social Security Administration, also reinforced by data that we get from our partners in ERIC, the Electronic Registration Information Center, where states share data with one another about voter registration. Voters themselves actively go online and change their voter status, either address, or whether or not they are still a resident of the state, or if they’ve shifted cities or towns. We received data from the Department of Corrections as to who has been incarcerated and who is getting out of prison, and so their voting rights are restored. The conglomeration of all this data is looked at by our staff here and local boards of canvassers who update our voter rolls consistently. So the idea that our voter rolls are filled with folks who have long been deceased is just not accurate.
Hernandez: You know that there are folks who have questions about the security of the ballots, of the secrecy of the ballots, and also to make sure that there’s no under- or over-counting. What can you tell us about how you secure that?
Amore: Well, we know the number of ballots that are in every precinct, and we know the number of ballots we have printed, and we know the number of ballots that have been cast, and those numbers are all cross-checked against each other. There is a chain of evidence in regard to our ballots that is signed off by at least two folks. In the case of pulling ballots from machines, those are put into bags that are sealed and we do the cross-check. The number of ballots that have been voted must match up with the number that the machine has indicated and that is the same circumstance with mail ballots. And so there is a robust process in place to make sure that these numbers don’t deviate. And then post-election, there is an audit and the audit is done in full public view. Randomly selected precincts in a statewide race, which could be a presidential race in this case, are hand-counted and matched to those machine counts. We’ve been doing this since 2017, and the machine counts and the hand count in the public audit have always matched.
Hernandez: Obviously, people are interested in how long is this going to take and when will the results be in? Usually, how long does it take in a presidential election?
Amore: Yeah, there’s results and there’s official results, right? Because in some states, the law does not allow those states to process mail ballots as they are received. So in Rhode Island, we process mail ballots as they are received. We don’t tabulate them till 8 p.m. on election night. So they’re not tabulated. We don’t have any idea who’s winning any particular race, but we’ve been able to process them as they’ve come in. For instance, Rhode Island has sent out around 56,000 mail ballots. We have processed around 40,000 of those already. In a close election, obviously, it’s going to take longer because that processing means more when the election can be decided by a few thousand votes.
Hernandez: After you process them, I’m wondering how long then does it take to certify these results?
Amore: So the certification takes place after the challenge period, and the certification in Rhode Island is done by the Rhode Island Board of Elections. I am a constitutional officer that is elected to office, so our office has no role in that, and that’s not the case around the country in every circumstance. I think Rhode Island does it right. We keep the political away from the certification process. But we hope to have our election here certified somewhere within a 20-day period if there aren’t legal challenges or court challenges or even challenges at the board of elections, so those would be the official results. What you hear on election night are unofficial results.
Hernandez: Secretary of State Gregg Amore, always a pleasure. Thank you so much.
Amore: Thank you, Luis.
Our local election night live coverage begins Nov. 5 at 7 p.m. on The Public’s Radio. Listen to national insights from NPR and updates from our reporters stationed at election night headquarters across the state. A live blog will also be available starting at 4 p.m. Go to thepublicsradio.org/2024elections to follow along and find more coverage of the elections in Rhode Island and the South Coast.
Election 2024 coverage by The Public’s Radio is sponsored in part by Ascent Audiology & Hearing, Providence Picture Frame and Rustigian Rugs.Â
