Elections officials in Ohio and across the country have been facing mounting pressure, driven in no small part by unfounded claims by Donald Trump and his allies of a “rigged” election in 2020.
This year, the Republican National Committee and other conservative groups are working to recruit and train an “army” of thousands of volunteers to monitor the vote tallying process.
What will this look like at the ballot box?
WOSU’s Matthew Rand spoke with David Payne, deputy director of the Franklin County Board of Elections.
Rand: To start off, I want to ask how you're doing and how your team is holding up amid the heated rhetoric over election security right now. There have been reports of election officials in some parts of the country who have received threats of violence. Has anything like that happened at your office? What's been the reaction from the public?
Payne: No, it's been fantastic. We're doing early voting now. We have 23 days of early voting. We've had actually 62,000 voters come in already to 1700 Morse Road. And then another 130,000 have requested absentee ballots. So we're excited. This is kind of our Super Bowl. We get excited about our elections and we like to show off about what we're doing and encourage people to vote. So no problems here so far.
Rand: Poll workers, poll watchers, election observers—these terms can be a bit confusing. Can you give us some definitions to work with?
Payne: We have to recruit about 6,000 poll workers to our 302 polling locations throughout Franklin County. So those are the typical people the voters would observe as they're coming in the voting locations. Then, of course, there's something called poll observers. And we've had both Republican and Democrat poll observers in our early vote center. And then we expect to have observers at our 302 polling locations, again, both Republicans and Democrats. And our poll workers are accustomed to observers. So, it's really nothing new for us here.
Rand: RNC co-chair Laura Trump has been quoted as saying her party will have not only poll watchers, but people who can “physically handle the ballots.” Is that something they're allowed to do?
Payne: No, absolutely not. So poll observers are to observe. They're not to be touching any ballots or any voting equipment. If they have questions during the day and it's not a busy time, they can ask our voting location managers or the workers there. If they want to speak to a voter, they could actually speak to a voter outside the polling location to determine their experience of voting on Election Day. So, no, they're not going to be touching any ballots or touching any voting machine or any equipment like that at the polling locations.
Rand: As you said, both parties have for a very long time used poll watchers to keep tabs on the voting process. But considering today's charged climate, are you worried at all about poll watchers causing any problems, even doing anything that would amount to voter intimidation?
Payne: No, not really. I know the individuals on both sides that are recruiting and training the poll watchers, and they're doing a good job, both Republicans and Democrats. So, no, I don't really have any concern about that. Of course, if we do have situations where there's intimidation of voting officials or voters themselves, we would handle that. And the voting location managers have the authority to remove observers if there were a situation like you described. But we don't expect that.
Rand: Voter fraud, it should be said, is extremely rare. But beyond that, how is your team preparing for any eventuality? And why should voters feel confident about Ohio's voting process?
Payne: So, everything we do—to logic and accuracy testing of our machines, to the voting process, to everything we do here at the Board of Elections—is done in a bipartisan manner, meaning a Republican and a Democrat go over everything we do. So there's a lot of security, a lot of redundancy that goes into this. But mostly, it's the fact that it's your friends, your neighbors, your family members that are actually administering these elections in the state of Ohio.
