Filipino Amer­i­cans take safe­guards to pro­tect their votes in US polls

Gina Soli­man (not her real name) has al­ready filled up her mail-in bal­lot, vot­ing for Joe Bi­den for pres­i­dent in the 2020 United States elec­tions.

Two weeks ago, she and her hus­band, both Fil­ipinos who mi­grated to the United States in 2000, went to their county in North Carolina to per­son­ally de­liver their bal­lots even though they could al­ways mail them back to au­thor­i­ties.

Hav­ing asked for bal­lots to be mailed to them to pro­tect them from the new coro­n­avirus, the cou­ple nev­er­the­less took a few min­utes’ trip from their home to their des­ig­nated county drop-off point to hand in their bal­lots.

“We want to pro­tect our votes,’’ she told the In­quirer, when asked why she went to all that trou­ble. The Soli­man cou­ple lives in North Carolina, one of 12 US states said to be the bat­tle­ground for the 2020 US pres­i­den­tial elec­tions.

Soli­man said the de­sire to pro­tect their votes came af­ter hear­ing US Pres­i­dent Don­ald Trump dur­ing the Oct. 2 pres­i­den­tial de­bate be­tween him and Bi­den, his Demo­cratic Party ri­val.

Trump had ques­tioned the in­tegrity of mail-in bal­lots.

Trump cited in par­tic­u­lar the case where some mail-in bal­lots were dumped in rivers in Wis­con­sin.

No miss­ing bal­lots

But the US me­dia has since re­ported that Wis­con­sin of­fi­cials have de­nied there were miss­ing ab­sen­tee bal­lots.

How­ever, the US Postal Ser­vice is con­duct­ing an in­ves­ti­ga­tion af­ter au­thor­i­ties re­ported that some bal­lots were tem­po­rar­ily lost in a batch of mail found in a ditch in Wis­con­sin.

While the Soli­man cou­ple are con­cerned over the pro­tec­tion of their votes, David Levine, Elec­tions In­tegrity Fel­low at the US Al­liance for Se­cur­ing Democ­racy, said mail-in vot­ing was a “se­cure process.’’

“We’ve had mail-in vot­ing right in the United States since the Civil War. We’ve seen state and lo­cal elec­tion of­fi­cials across the po­lit­i­cal spec­trum that have some form of mail-in vot­ing that ex­ists,’’ said Levine, who be­longs to a group sup­port­ing elec­tion se­cu­rity in the United States.

Mail-in vot­ing fraud ‘rare’

Brief­ing par­tic­i­pants of the US For­eign Press Cen­ter Vir­tual Re­port­ing Tour on the 2020 US elec­tions, which in­cluded the In­quirer, Levine stressed that fraud in US elec­tions, in­clud­ing mail-in vot­ing, was “rare.’’

“I think there’s been a num­ber of stud­ies that have been done right in this both in gov­ern­ment, as well as in the re­search com­mu­nity that in­di­cate that fraud is rare,’’ he said.

Levine men­tioned an op-ed in The Hill where Am­ber Reynolds, a for­mer Colorado elec­tion of­fi­cial and now the chief ex­ec­u­tive of­fi­cer of the Na­tional Vote at Home In­sti­tute, and Charles Stew­art, di­rec­tor of the MIT Elec­tion Data and Science Lab, wrote that more than 250 mil­lion bal­lots had been cast by mail na­tion­wide over the past 20 years but just 143 crim­i­nal con­vic­tions re­lated to them.

Safe­guards in place

“That av­er­ages out to about one case per state every six or seven years, or a fraud rate of 0.00006 per­cent,’’ he said.
Levine as­sured that state and lo­cal of­fi­cials had a num­ber of checks and bal­ances in place to en­sure there would be no elec­tion fraud.

“(V)ot­ers should feel con­fi­dent that safe­guards are in place to pro­tect their votes from cy­ber­at­tacks and tech­ni­cal prob­lems that could arise for the Novem­ber 2020 pres­i­den­tial elec­tion,’’ Levine added.

He cited the “sub­stan­tial progress made to im­ple­ment the kind of backup and se­cu­rity fea­tures that should al­low all vot­ers to cast bal­lots that will be counted even in the event of a suc­cess­ful cy­ber­at­tack or other un­fore­seen sys­tems fail­ure.’’

These in­cluded the US gov­ern­ment mak­ing sure that “there will be a pa­per record of nearly every vote for 2020,’’ he said.

In the ques­tion and an­swer por­tion, Levine cited safe­guards that elec­tion of­fi­cials had set up to pro­tect against fraud and ma­nip­u­la­tion in mail-in vot­ing.

These in­cluded, among oth­ers, sig­na­ture ver­i­fi­ca­tion of vot­ers through the use of sig­na­ture match­ing soft­ware in some states; the use of mail bal­lot tech­nol­ogy; and more op­tions to sub­mit mail bal­lots that in­cluded states
in­stalling “ac­ces­si­ble, se­cure drop boxes and drop-off lo­ca­tions that make it eas­ier for vot­ers to drop off their bal­lots per­son­ally as op­posed to re­ly­ing on a third party, such as the (US) Postal Ser­vice, to as­sist with this task.’’

The last op­tion was the one taken by the Soli­man cou­ple, who went to the drop-off sta­tion to hand in their bal­lots per­son­ally.

Levine said they ex­pected a record num­ber of mail-in vot­ing this elec­tion as well as a large num­ber of peo­ple vot­ing in per­son.

As of Oct. 30, more than 85 mil­lion Amer­i­cans have voted early—either by mail or in per­son, ac­cord­ing to the Bri­tish Broad­cast­ing News which quoted the US Elec­tions Pro­ject. It said the num­ber of Amer­i­cans who have voted early so far com­prised 62 per­cent of the to­tal num­ber of Amer­i­cans who voted in the 2016 elec­tions.