Philadelphia’s Mail-in Ballot Counting Machines: The Eyes of the World Will Be on Philadelphia (Phiensburg, PA)

The room has metal beams and high overhead lighting. Paper whizzes through conveyor belts on large gears near tall, human-sized cages with keypad locks.

As this count is taking place, an opposing process will be spinning up: a disinformation apparatus that aims to convince voters the election is being rigged.

The Pennsylvania electoral votes could decide who wins the presidential election in two years. Many of the state’s ballots have already been cast through the mail. Yet Pennsylvania’s laws prohibit even beginning to process mail-in ballots until 7AM on Election Day. The result is a serious delay in the reporting of election results, which the Associated Press did not call Pennsylvania as having been won by Biden until four days after Election Day.

The city organized a press tour to show voters that voting is secure and trustworthy. It’s an attempted bulwark against false claims about ballots being inaccurately tallied, flipped, or destroyed to skew election results.

The vice chair of the Philadelphia City Commissioners expects the delay to be shorter than 2020. Mail-in voting was an unusually popular option that year due to the ongoing covid-19 pandemic. Each hour counts when a conspiracy can break out in seconds on social media. “The more people hear things, unfortunately, the more inclined they are to believe them,” she says.

An election scanner is basically a huge Scantron machine with metal S-shape that glides along the paper ballots, reading the marks voters have made. This warehouse has eight high-speed scanners, each one expected to check about 2,500 ballots per hour. Four slower scans can read 1,000 per hour. If the ballot has been marked with a light-colored pen, or if there were mistakes with Wite- Out, it can’t be read. A staff of nonpartisan civil servants review these and mark the voter’s choices onto replacement ballots, which can then be scanned.

Bluestein told reporters in the warehouse that the eyes of the world would be on Philadelphia. We are going to run the most secure election in history.

Source: Can Philadelphia’s ballot counters outrun election lies?

Why do we live in a society where everything gets done fairly, timely, and ethically? The case of the 21st year of the American election

Election observers — who are selected by each party — will watch screens showing the ballots to help ensure everything is adjudicated fairly. The ballots are sent to another locked storage area. They will be kept in long term storage for the 22 months mandated by law, in case they are needed for a recount.

The threats are not always amusing. Bluestein told The Verge that he received death threats while ballots were being counted. The harassment got so bad that Bluestein had police protection at his house the week of the election.

So far, “the heat is down” in 2024, he says. election officials in the country are on high alert. In one of the swing state’s, an official has said that security will be available when election workers have to go to their cars. The staff worked on a scenario of artificial intelligence scam, which the state is preparing for.

Bluestein is trying to catch false information on the internet. A nonprofit offering services to homeless and low income people was accused of stealing thousands of mail-in ballots from one address. (Bluestein says “fewer than 150 ballots” were mailed there in 2020.)

He feels social media platforms are not doing as good a job in fighting misinformation as they did in 2020. Four years ago, platforms were always on alert for false claims and often failed to enforce their policies effectively. In 2024, the situation is different. Under pressure from Trump and his allies to take a more hands-off role when it comes to election misinformation, many tech companies have relaxed the policies they had in place last time around. Meta and X have made it harder for researchers to get data used to monitor threats, because they rolled back rules against false claims about the election.

The level of harassment and threats haven’t been seen by Bluestein and Sabir yet. Bluestein says broader misinformation claims are circulating, but he hasn’t found as many claims that single out specific officials or rank-and-file workers. Philadelphia had no problem getting people to work at the warehouse despite being harassed in 2020. “I think everyone understands the importance of this work, and they understand that while there could be risks associated with it, they’re all signing up to do the job.”

Misinformation often picks at tensions that already exist. Black Americans, for example, are already a group commonly targeted by disenfranchisement efforts, which Sabir says results in “misconceptions about ‘my vote doesn’t count.’” Add that, and Sabir says that it makes the community ask what am I doing? Why do I not get done with my work?

But Hinchey says those efforts will fail. Lawyers and allies of the President brought a number of cases to change the election results. Some of the lawyers who filed those suits have been disbarred. “The analysis now seems to be, ‘Well, then let’s go directly for the votes themselves, and discredit certain kinds of voters and make it seem like certain people are voting that are not, so that we can then attack all votes.’”

As for trust, a September Spotlight PA poll by MassINC Polling Group found that 63 percent of respondents were very or somewhat confident that votes in the presidential race would be counted accurately and fairly nationally. But voters had far more confidence in how elections in their own counties would be administered — 78 percent expressed confidence in the results.

According to Susan Gobreski of the League of Women Voters of Philadelphia, more people are interested in getting involved in the process of democracy in order to calm election fears. Most people are actually acting in good faith, but hearing about election skeptics raising some red flags may be a sign.

Involving the public and press in trustworthy information is a smart move. “You can’t dispel all bad information with good information, but you can make sure that organizations and the press have a really good understanding of how elections are actually functioning in Pennsylvania,” she says. Gobreski suggests voters to ask questions but also to listen to the answers.

A Far-Right Activist’s View of the 2016 U.S. Election: Celebrating the News with Laura Loomer

Since the election of the president, Robinson has become a celebrity. She calls Laura Loomer to inquire about the latest breaking news. She and her business partner Vem Miller, who was arrested at a Trump rally in possession of a shotgun and a handgun, have over 400,000 followers on X and their own show on the America Happens Network. Robinson, an actress with over 150 credits to her name, doesn’t indulge in many conspiracy theories but does believe that the 2020 election was stolen and that some major school shootings are actually the work of crisis actors. She even believes the moon landing didn’t happen.

Far-right groups have been working around the clock to train election deniers, who have spent years buying and building an alternative reality. The groups are well-connected: The Election Integrity Network is run by former Trump adviser Cleta Mitchell, and True the Vote, a Texas-based group, was cofounded by election denial superstar Catherine Engelbrecht who has worked on dropbox monitoring and voter roll purge initiatives around the country for more than a decade. Election observers have also been trained in online calls by pro-Trump groups like Turning Point USA and the campaign’s own TrumpForce47.

The weekend ahead of the election, Robinson and thousands of others like her are challenging election officials and spreading conspiracy theories online and in person. Right-wing election observers are already at polling sites and voting tabulation centers; this weekend, election officials in Shasta County, California walked off the job because of the aggressive behavior of election observers.

Robinson told WIRED at a Las Vegas restaurant that he wants to see if his vote is counted while he isn’t doing anything. “I want to see it magically show up as counted. It’s the only fucking thing I can do at this point.”