Secretary of State Paul Pate visits HC to talk election security

Paper ballots, cyber security and a county auditor is what makes each election in Iowa efficient and secure, Iowa Secretary of State Paul Pate touted during a visit with Henry County Auditor Shelly Barber on Wednesday, Oct. 17.

Pate, who is running for his third term as secretary of state, is touring Iowa counties to reassure voters' confidence in Iowa's election system and answer any questions county auditors may have ahead of the election on Nov. 6.

'No one is hacking to change your vote at all. It sounds so simplistic, but we vote in paper ballots,” Pate said. 'The safety net is your neighbors working at those nine precinct sites. They know who you are when you come in. No one is a stranger.”

The ballots, tallied up at the precinct, are phoned in to the Henry County Auditor's Office on election night. From there, employees in the auditor's office wait for poll workers to bring in fobs from the voting machines, which are downloaded to a computer that is not connected to the internet.

From there, votes are downloaded into a computer to send to the state, and that is the only time votes are connected to a network, Henry County Auditor Shelly Barber said.

'Even if the tallies should be messed with from the time it goes to us to the state, it's going to show up,” Barber said.

The county had an audit completed on their network system a year and a half ago and the system could not be breached by a 'very reputable firm,” Barber said. Security has been tightened even further since that audit.

'I feel very secure that no one can get in and hack our system,” Barber said.

A new process Pate spoke about called postelection audit further ensures votes are tallied correctly. The Iowa secretary of state's office selects one precinct out of each county and asks them to do a manual count. This is just one extra cross-checking measure to make sure votes are accurate, Pate said.

Additionally, electronic pollbooks show how many people vote. Tally sheets show how many ballots go through the machine. Those numbers have to match, Barber said. If they don't match, the Auditor's Office has to figure out why.

'Not one of our elections that we've gone through didn't match,” Henry County Election Coordinator Robin Detrick said. 'If they don't, we always find it and it always matches. There's always a reason: human error and mistakes.”

Pate doesn't want to see voters question the integrity of the voting process to the point where they say an election wasn't legitimate.

'We don't want … ‘that's not my governor, that's not my senator, that's not my president,'” Pate said. 'We've worked so hard and the auditor's office worked very hard to create this transparency, so you can see the voting process.

'Our people in Iowa vote, and they are serious voters,” he continued. 'Our citizens have connections to their community. They want to be part of the voting process.”