An apparent attempt to tamper with Hawaii’s election was foiled last week when a machine in the state’s Hilo counting center rejected 11 ballots bearing the same bar code, indicating they had probably been photocopied.
The state Office of Elections is reviewing the ballots and investigating how the Election Day incident occurred, Nedielyn Bueno, a spokeswoman in the state office, said Monday.
“The vote counting system rejects duplicate ballots to prevent a ballot from mistakenly being scanned more than once by an operator or having multiple copies of the same ballot,” Bueno said. “There was an instance where duplicate ballots were flagged by the vote counting system at the Hilo counting center and the ballots were removed from the batch and secured.”
It’s not yet known how the ballots, which apparently did not have mail-in envelopes, made their way into the counting center. The Hilo center is the sole counting center on the island and handles all the island’s ballots.
“At this time, we understand that the system worked as intended to stop duplicate ballots from being scanned,” Bueno said.
State law allows no less than one official observer designated by each political party and no less than one official observer from the news media, as well as observers designated by the by the state’s chief election officer and the county clerk, as space permits.
Volunteer observers spent long hours on Election Day, Nov. 8, with some not leaving until daybreak Wednesday.
One of those was Tiffany Edwards Hunt, a media observer on behalf of the Big Island Press Club. Edwards Hunt said she was standing near a long table, watching workers remove ballots from envelopes that had been cut open by a machine.
“They take the ballots out of the envelopes and they stack them up and it’s a very, very rigorous process,” she said. “They’re organized by precinct into piles and then they’re put into a box and transported with an escort (across the room) to the computers and then they’re put into the computer.”
Edwards Hunt said one of the representatives from Hart InterCivic, the equipment vendor, rushed over to the table and alerted the county’s acting election administrator there was a problem at one of the machines, detailing for the group what had happened.
Not only did the duplicate ballots have the same bar code, they were also on different paper stock than the authentic ballots, Edwards Hunt said.
“It really was concerning to me how the ballots could even get into the room. … I wanted to know more. I wanted to know what they came in and how they got to the machines,” Edwards Hunt said. “But essentially I felt comforted that the machines caught the ballots.”
(Disclosure: Nancy Cook Lauer is on the Big Island Press Club executive board, as is Edwards Hunt.)