Mail-in voting has come under attack this election season, as President Donald Trump has insisted it's rife with fraud. The president also signed an executive order directing the U.S. Postal Service to block the delivery of ballots to voters unless they were on lists submitted by state election officials — a move that has been blocked by the Supreme Court.
With all of this as a backdrop, Berkshire Eagle reporter Tara Monastesse recently visited the place where Pittsfield securely stores its ballots. She described what she saw to WAMC's News Director Andrew Waite.
Tara Monastesse: So I got a chance to really see every aspect of the press. I got to see a city voting official empty the ballot box that sits outside City Hall. They put it into a big bin and they bring it into the city's Registrar of Voting and Elections. And from there, the mail-in ballots are mailed in this outer white envelope and they're sliced open and inside there's a manila envelope that the voter has signed if they've done it correctly, and then it gets time-stamped in a little machine, and then they get sorted by precinct and kind of bound up with rubber bands and put in these mail trays.
Andrew Waite: And who's actually doing this work?
Monastesse: It's a collaboration between the City Clerk's office and the Registrar of Voting and Elections office. So I believe that's about six city employees altogether, and there were also about four community volunteers who show up to help out with organizing, counting materials, overseeing all that stuff.
Waite: And what messaging did they have in terms of election security? Like, what reassurances did they offer to to voters by talking to you? What was their message that the election is secure and it's for this reason because we're doing X, Y, Z?
Monastesse: Yeah, overall, the impression that I got from speaking with city officials that they're very adamant about votes being tamper-proof, about voter fraud being — I believe one of the officials said it was "impossible" —considering the circumstances they have. There is a camera, so first of all, I should set up for you what it looks like, where the votes are stored. It's a vault, and I mean that like a literal vault, like one of those big heavy-duty doors. And the only people allowed to access it are, you know, the people actively working to process the election, and I guess the reporters who visited yesterday.
But yeah, there is a camera inside of the vault that the city clerk's office had installed specifically to monitor, you know, who's going in and out of the vault, who is touching the ballots, who is packaging them away into their little mailing boxes. I know that Josh Munn, who was one of the officials in the voting office, was telling me that you know, no one besides the people actively, you know, in that office have access to that vault. There is also a process - so the city tracks mailing ballots as well as in-person ballots. So, like, say, if I wanted to, if I sent in a mail-in ballot, and then I was like, "Hehehe, I'm going to go in and cast an in-person vote," because the mail in ballot is tracked, that wouldn't be able to go through and vice versa.
Waite: Got it. And in this vault, is it mail-in ballots and early in-person ballots that end up there?
Monastesse: Yes.
Waite: OK. And they are all then in this vault — there's a camera on it at all times. [There's] limited access to this vault. And then what? Do they sit there until Election Day? When do they start to count them?
Monastesse: Yeah, so exactly right. They do sit there until the actual Election Day comes around. On Election Day, so they're organized by precinct in the mailing trays, and then the ballots...
Waite: And these trays are within the vault?
Monastesse: Yes, they're within the vault. And then all of the ballots are actually brought to the polling places for each precinct, which they are then counted to get the final totals for each precinct; then, you know all of that together gets us our results for Pittsfield on Election Day.
Waite: Well, obviously a vault seems pretty secure, especially when there's a camera that is over, you know, that is looking at it at all times. But what specific assurances did the people who you spoke to provide to voters that this election is going to be counted fairly? That your ballot is going to be counted fairly?
Monastesse: Yeah, I mean, generally, just what I was hearing from both offices, the clerk's office and, you know, the voting office was just that. There's so much work that goes into making sure everything is accurate. Even the blank ballots that get sent in, someone has to individually count every one of them to make sure there's actually that number. There's some pretty intensive testing that goes into making sure, you know, the machine that you feed your ballot into that actually counts the vote is accurate. They do a bunch of tests, like they fill out sample ballots, to my understanding, and they slip them through, and then they track "did the machine actually record what I wrote down," and if there's an error, like was that a human error or was it the machine? So everything is very extensively tested.
And Michele Benjamin, who is the city clerk of Pittsfield, showed me just the machines that they have, you know, at the polling places that kind of scan the ballots, and they have these like red zip ties, [that's] the only way I can describe it. It's like they're security seals, so, you know, when someone has opened them, they can't be tampered with. So, yeah, I was really hearing from city officials that there is just a lot of work to be done to make sure everything is accurate. And, you know, like I was saying, someone in the voting office told me that outside of you know the reporter's visit, there is no one besides the city officials who work in specifically in voting who are allowed to access the the ballots.
Waite: And how about the safety of poll workers and people who are, you know, doing this counting work? Like, did anybody that you spoke with in Pittsfield talk about threats that they've faced in recent years? Is that a concern of theirs? Is that something that they have dealt with explicitly?
Monastesse: Yeah, I did ask the city clerk and the assistant city clerk if anyone has, you know, confronted them around this election time in regards to, you know, concerns about mail ballot fraud, and I didn't hear any specific examples of it happening recently. But I know that they both said that they were very dialed into the national conversation about mail-in ballots, and, you know, they're both very passionate about the security of the process. So I didn't hear any specific concerns about, like you said, threats or any kind of hostility from people. But I know that it is something that officials are aware of, and it's something that, you know, they're following that national conversation.
This transcript was generated by artificial intelligence and reviewed by WAMC staff.
