Keeping ballots and poll workers safe in Georgia's 2024 election
In the runup to Election Day in Georgia, Gabriel Sterling is trying to prevent all possible scenarios that might disturb his state's vote.
Sterling is the chief operating officer for Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, whose office runs elections in Georgia, a battleground state preparing for a very close Election Day.
In 2021, then-President Donald Trump called Raffensperger, a Republican, and tried to get him to change the results of the 2020 presidential election in the state. Raffensperger refused. Later, both Raffensperger and Sterling testified before the House January 6th Committee and a grand jury in Georgia about the 2020 election.
Today, election deniers continue to use debunked conspiracy theories to challenge the legitimacy of the 2020 election, and officials hope to proactively ward off any suspicions about this year's contest.
For this week's 60 Minutes, correspondent Scott Pelley spoke with Sterling to see how Georgia officials are preparing for this year's election – both in safeguarding the ballot and in assuring people that the race in the Peach State is fair.
Security precautions at the polls
One of Sterling's priorities for Election Day is keeping the polls safe, both for voters and for poll workers.
He told Pelley his office is working across the state with local law enforcement agencies to centralize the safety effort and to make plans for various Election Day scenarios.
In the event of any action that disturbs the polls — such as a person verbally assaulting a poll worker or someone threatening a voter with a gun — Georgia has invested in a texting tool for every county that wants to opt in. With one text, a poll worker can immediately get through to the county elections director, the state elections director, and local law enforcement at the same time.
In Georgia's Election Day war room, all the agencies who may need to be called upon to keep the vote going will assemble. This includes the FBI and Georgia's state equivalent, and the companies in charge of gas, power, and trains in the state.
"We really have to think about everything you can think of," Sterling said. "A tree falls over and knocks out the power somewhere? We have to work quickly to get it done, because any one of these things can then turn into a conspiracy theory, as we've learned over and over again."
Securing the ballot
After explaining how Georgia plans to keep poll workers and voters safe, Sterling walked 60 Minutes through Georgia's approach for securing its ballots.
At the polls, the first thing Georgia voters must do is show their ID. They bring it to a poll worker holding a check-in device called a "poll pad." If voters don't have a driver's license, they can use another government ID. The barcode on the back of the ID pulls up their information in the state voter rolls, assuring they are legally allowed to cast a ballot.
Once the ID has been scanned, a voter signs the poll pad, and the poll worker signs to verify that they witnessed the voter's signature. The poll worker then encodes the appropriate ballot for the voter's precinct onto a green voter card, which is used to access the ballot marking device, or BMD.
Although each of Georgia's 159 counties has its own election team, the ballots for every resident are prepared and coded by the secretary of state's office.
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After the voter inserts the green voter card into the device and selects their desired candidates, the machine prints a paper copy of their ballot, indicating exactly who they voted for and asking the voter to confirm their selection.
From there, the paper ballot goes into a scanner, which takes an image of the ballot and keeps a record of the number of ballots that have been scanned.
Sterling told 60 Minutes the paper copy is an important step.
"You want to have an auditable trail," he said. "So that if the memory cards get corrupted, we lose anything that happens on these [BMDs], we can compare the paper records to the outcomes that came out of all the machinery to make sure that it's done correctly."
Paul Petruska, a trained poll worker in Georgia, said the redundancy in the process shows the integrity of the state's voting system.
"You have three different areas that are keeping a count," he told 60 Minutes. "All three are totally separated from each other."
The poll pads, Petruska explained, have data from the state-run registrar of who is eligible to vote, and they cannot be altered at the local level. These devices begin the count of voters.
Next, the ballot marking devices, which are independent of the poll pads, tally the number of voters and record their selections. Finally, the scanner that photographs the paper ballots also counts the number of ballots inserted. All three devices independently count the number of votes recorded, and the numbers can be compared against each other.
To further safeguard the ballots, voting machines and scanners are not connected to the Internet and cannot be hacked, Sterling told 60 Minutes.
Each machine has two memory cards where ballot results are downloaded. The first memory card is taken by two election workers to the respective county's headquarters. There, the results will be put into another offline machine, which tallies the votes. Those results are then downloaded onto a separate memory stick and put into a computer that is connected directly to the state's election system, where the votes are posted publicly by the secretary of state's office.
The second memory card, along with the paper ballots that were inside the scanner, are taken to local election headquarters through a strict chain of custody.
If people still doubt that votes can be changed or added, poll worker Petruska pointed to the hand count. After the election, election workers take a percentage of specific races and hand count the voters' selections as reflected by the paper ballots to verify the number matches up with the record from the ballot marking devices.
"There's no way you can rig the system. You can't stuff ballots," Petruska said. "You can't bring in people into the registrar that aren't there. It's just all falsehood. It's somebody standing on a soap box wanting to scare people, use fear tactics. And we're here to make sure that doesn't work."
The video above was produced by Brit McCandless Farmer and edited by Scott Rosann.