CALDWELL — When Canyon County Commissioner Leslie Van Beek cast her vote in the Vallivue levy election on Aug. 28, her ballot did not reflect her choice.
Van Beek described her experience on the KBOI radio’s Kasper and Chris podcast the following day.
“They said, ‘may I have your ballot?’” Van Beek said, “and I said, ‘no you may not. This is not the same vote I cast.’”
Van Beek was looking at the ballot printout from her voting machine. Because she caught the difference before she put the ballot in the ballot box, poll workers were able to “spoil,” or destroy the ballot, and let her cast her vote on the machine one more time. This time, the printed ballot reflected her true intent.
After Van Beek shared her concerns with elections staff, the Canyon County Elections Office hosted a voting machine demonstration Friday morning to showcase how to use the machine and help voters verify that their choices match their intent.
Though it is still unclear what happened in Van Beek’s case, one potential pitfall of the machines — known colloquially as Duo machines — is that it is possible for a voter to accidentally make a selection they did not intend by attempting to swipe on the machine’s touch screen instead of clicking to scroll, said Haley Hicks, elections operations supervisor. Though the machine’s touch screen is similar in size to a large tablet, the voting software does not allow the user to swipe up to move up or down the page using one’s fingers, as on a tablet or smart phone. Instead, if a voter wants to read through the text of a levy, for example, or scroll through a long candidate list, there are orange arrow buttons for them to click to make the text shift up or down.
If they try to swipe on the screen, they may unintentionally select a voting option they did not mean to.
“We actually saw it in 2020 a lot because there were so many candidates,” Hicks said.
That said, there are two safeguards in place to ensure that the votes reflect the voter’s intention: the first is a screen that asks the voter to verify their selections. If anything looks different, the voter can navigate back through the electronic ballot to the vote in question and change it.
The second is looking at the printed-out ballot itself before inserting it into the ballot box, as Van Beek did. Because it is not an official document until it goes into the ballot box and through the precinct scanner, it can be discarded so that the voter can recast their ballot if needed, Hicks said.
“That’s why we always encourage voters, if you do find an issue, please go to a poll worker, because once its cast in the ballot box, we can’t get it back,” she said. Voters should ask poll workers for help at any point in the process, she said.
In Canyon County poll worker trainings after the 2020 election, elections staff began emphasizing that the poll worker who presides over the ballot box needs to encourage every voter to double-check their ballot choices, asking “have you read your choices? Is everything accurate before you cast your ballot?”
There are two voting machine companies authorized to operate in Idaho. A member of the public suggested that the legislature could pressure the company that makes the county’s voting machines to modify the software so it could be more responsive to swiping given that this is a known issue.
The way the software is now — not swipe-friendly — is thought to be in compliance with accessibility standards, Hicks said. Though she agreed asking the company to modify its software made sense, she said that the company is large and supplies machines across the U.S., so change may be slow.
“So we get to … change our process to ensure that we are making note of it, and allowing the voters to understand, and educating them until there is a change made that would make it a lot more simplified for everyone involved,” she said.
County Clerk Chris Yamamoto said, “I think the takeaway is the machine does not, cannot, change a vote.” Errors that occur are from users, he said, likening it to accidentally typing a “t” when you mean to type an “r,” or hitting something on your smart device that you did not intend to.
“It’s voter input and you have two opportunities to check and ensure that how you voted is what’s on that paper,” Yamamoto said.
Van Beek said in an emailed statement following the event, “while the Board appreciates the meeting facilitated by the Clerk, it does not negate my voting experience. The Board is committed to the integrity of the election process and ensuring that every vote counts.”
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