With a week to go until Election Day, millions of Americans — and thousands of Vermonters — have already cast their ballots.

The Green Mountain State permanently expanded mail-in voting after generating record turnout during the COVID-19 pandemic, meaning more and more of the work of organizing elections is happening before the first Tuesday in November.

What actually happens after you drop your envelope in the mailbox? Vermont Public’s Bob Kinzel spent a morning with election officials in Montpelier, including City Clerk John Odum, to learn firsthand how ballots are processed and what measures are in place to keep results secure.

More from Vermont Public: Vermont has become one of the easiest places in the country to vote, but gaps remain

This story is made for the ear. We highly recommend that you listen to the audio. We have also provided a transcript, which has been edited for length and clarity.

Bob Kinzel: Okay, so what we’re going to do is walk to the polls right outside of City Hall.

Johannes Odum: This is some kind of box. This thing is hard to get into. Two keys are needed. The slot is very narrow and is protected by some sort of metal lip over it, so no one can get in unless they put a ballot in there. No one pours gasoline in it and sets it on fire. It’s safer than that.

OK. We received our ballots.

Bob Kinzel

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Vermont Public

Bob Kinzel: Okay, so we got ballots from the ballot box, and now we’re going to take them back to your office. What are we going to do with them?

John Odum: We’re going to open them. Well, we’re going to open up the ballots from the mailings, and then we’re going to set aside the actual ballots inside the ballot. We no longer need the mailing envelope at all, but for now we will keep the ballots in the sealed and signed envelopes.

Bob Kinzel: Odum takes the ballots back to his office and hands them to Deputy City Clerk Sara McMillon, who processes them at her desk. She uses the city’s electronic checklist to record that a voter has officially submitted a ballot. It is a system that prevents someone from voting twice.

Sara McMillon: And then it checks, and then I know, it keeps track of that person voting. And so the voter can log in online and see that we have received his ballot. If someone hasn’t signed it or someone hasn’t dated it, we’ll mark it as defective, and then we can call them and have them come to City Hall to correct the vote, or we can send them a letter that’s telling them to can send it back to us saying it’s okay for us to count their ballot even though it’s not signed.

Bob Kinzel

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Vermont Public

Bob Kinzel: Clerk Odum then takes the ballot envelopes and places them in the city’s vault for safekeeping. They will remain there until local election officials begin the tabulation process. It’s a process that can take place several weeks before Election Day. The optical scanning machine counts the number of ballots entered into it, but does not announce the results until election day.

John Odum: And again, I’m keeping that padlock locked because our safe is so small, I feel like I need some extra security in here. But yeah, so they stay there, and then we take them out when it’s time to run them through the tabulator, which I’m having a few people do right now.

So we have one person who opens them and puts them face down. But the idea is that if this person puts the envelopes down, this person who takes the ballots out never sees the name. So no one ever sees both a ballot paper and a name associated with a ballot paper. Everything is always locked. It’s always in the safe. As soon as I, as soon as these people are done, I’m going to lock it back up and put it right back in the safe. And this is: we only use the one; we’re going to run three more machines on election day.

Bob Kinzel: The optical scanning machines are returned to the safe after use and have small blue seals on the lid that clearly indicate if the machine has been tampered with in any way.

John Odum: Where we verify that these seals have not been changed, and that you have to get inside the seals to get the programming cards. Can you come in now and change those numbers? That is extremely difficult to imagine. If you could get into it. I think the biggest concern when you start talking about cybersecurity with these tabulators is mischief – not so much changing numbers, but trying to get in there and just screw something up so we have to re-vote, or something. Like this.

These things are not connected to any network. They don’t have modems like cell modems do these days, so in terms of physical security they are as good as it gets. Someone would have to physically come to the machine and gain access to it, break the seals and go in and take a card, one of the memory cards that are there, do something with it, you know, cut it in half break or something. So no, we don’t have those kinds of concerns at all. And I am very grateful for that. It is not difficult to tell whether there has been an infringement.

Bob Kinzel: Processing these early mail-in ballots has kept the Montpelier County Clerk’s office very busy these days, as has many communities across the state. That’s because in many cities as many as half of voters will cast their ballots via the mail-in system this year.

Peter Engisch provided production support for this story.

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