How to track your ballot and what to do if it’s damaged

Choice Officials in Vancouver, Washington, are encouraging voters to check the status of their absentee ballots after an arson attack he set fire to the ballot box on Monday morning, destroying hundreds of ballots a week before Election Day.

While incidents in which bad actors attack ballot drop boxes are rare, experts told ABC News that the infrastructure surrounding mail-in voting over the past decade has allowed election officials to prepare for such events through the use of 24/7 surveillance, fire suppression systems, and advanced software to track votes.

“These are scenarios that election officials have been keeping up at night and thinking about for years and as part of their contingency planning,” said Claire Woodall-Vogg, former executive director of the Milwaukee Board of Elections. “While this is very rare, it is something your election official has certainly thought about.”

Monday’s arson, which destroyed hundreds of ballots in Vancouver, Washington, and three in Portland, Oregon, follows other incidents last week when ballots in Florida and Arizona were damaged in transit. Phoenix authorities also arrested a man last week for arson he lit a fire at a USPS mailbox, destroying five ballots, and federal prosecutors in Florida charged another man last week with allegedly disposing of hundreds of election mail, including at least one ballot.

Here’s what you need to know about dealing with a damaged ballot.

How can voters find out if their ballot is affected?

According to Brian Hinkle, senior voting policy researcher at the Movement Advancement Project, voters who suspect their ballot may be affected should contact their local elections office to confirm whether they received their ballot.

Forty-seven states offer free ballot tracking services so voters can confirm whether their ballots have been mailed, received and counted. In Clark County, Washington – where Vancouver is located – voters can track their ballots via VoteWA online tool.

“If they don’t get word that their ballot has been accepted for counting or it doesn’t even get delivered to the county clerk’s office, they’ll know something is wrong,” said Steve Olsen, president of BallotTrax, a software company whose vote-tracking service includes 28% of American voters.

If possible, election officials will also attempt to contact any voter who they believe may be impacted by the event to ensure their ballot has arrived or to assist in obtaining a replacement ballot. Because the USPS recommends that voters mail their ballot by Oct. 29 to ensure it arrives on time, some voters who request a replacement ballot may have to vote in person rather than try to vote by mail again.

“In every state, in every legal system, there are systems in place to ensure that a criminal act like this does not take away someone’s voice,” Woodall-Vogg said.

How can election officials track individual ballots?

According to Olsen, election officials are able to track individual ballots using “smart postal barcodes” that are embedded in absentee ballot envelopes.

“Voters can track their ballots in much the same way they would track mail delivery,” Hinkle said.

Barcodes – printed on envelopes sent to voters, as well as on the return envelopes of the ballots themselves – allow voters to track when their absentee ballot is sent, returned and received by election officials.

Tracking technology cannot verify how the ballot was completed.

“We basically track envelopes,” Olsen said. “We don’t have access to the ballots.”

VotingTrax works with election offices in 546 counties across the United States, serving 72 million voters and tracking more than 240 million ballots. Created in 2009 to help the city of Denver with its elections, the company grew tenfold in 2020 as large swaths of the country moved to mail-in voting amid the Covid-19 pandemic.

According to Olsen, individual counties foot the bill for the BallotTrax service, which allows voters to opt-in to receive free information about the status of their ballots. Even if a voter does not consent to tracking, election offices can still track ballots to identify problems.

Once the ballot arrives at the local election office and is removed from the return envelope, it will no longer be possible to identify a specific voter, thus maintaining the anonymity of the vote.

“Once you remove the ballot from the envelope that has all the identifying markings on it, the ballot becomes anonymous at that point,” Olsen said.

What happens to damaged ballots?

If a ballot is damaged in transit but is still recognizable, election officials may attempt to remake the ballot so it can be fed into the voting machine. Bipartisan teams engage in a process known as “ballot duplication.”

“Election workers will reconstruct the ballot to preserve voter intent and translate it into a new, blank ballot,” Hinke said.

If a voter suspects that their ballot may have been damaged, they should contact their local elections office to confirm whether they have received a ballot or whether they need to request a replacement ballot.

Are ballot boxes secure?

According to experts, despite recent high-profile incidents, ballot boxes are still one of the safest ways to vote.

Most ballot drop boxes are tamper-proof, bolted to the ground, under 24-hour surveillance and equipped with fire suppression systems. In most areas, the ballots themselves are collected by two-person teams.

“We have a chain of custody system so we know when we received the ballots and when we returned them, and all the ballots have barcodes on them so they’re secure,” said George Dreckmann, a longtime poll worker in Milwaukee. “So the drop box system is as safe as putting them in the post office, and in some cases it may even be safer.”

Drop boxes in many states are equipped with fire suppression systems that extinguish fires using powder rather than water, preventing further damage to ballots. Although the fire suppression system did not operate effectively during Monday’s arson in Clark County, election officials credited the fire suppression system with saving more than 400 ballots in neighboring Multnomah County, Oregon.

“These drop boxes are very secure and voters should have confidence in using them,” Hinkle said.