San Francisco officials rigorously test ballot counters ahead of Election Day
Ballot by ballot, hundreds of voting systems are being put to the test at the San Francisco Department of Elections warehouse where department's director John Artnz expects 100% accuracy.
"So our folks here will run the cards, these test decks, through the equipment. And afterwards we'll run the results tape on that," Artnz told CBS News Bay Area of the rigorous pre-election testing. "Then we verify the results tapes against the expected results. And so every machine has to have results that match exactly to the expected results."
With each ping of a properly counted ballot, more than 500 ballot counting systems that voters will run their own ballots through on election day at polling locations are currently undergoing accuracy testing.
"It has to pick up each vote mark on those cards accurately, and then also has to pick up when there's no votes, because we actually have cards here that have no votes, or contests with no votes, or too many votes. And so the submission has to pick up all scenarios, the over votes, under votes, and the accurately marked cards," Arntz explained. "So we test in the beginning and we test again at the end, and again, it's just to make sure that the votes that the public knows that the votes they cast were captured and we they were reported correctly."
Despite no room for error and more than a dozen layers of protection and transparency, skepticism in the election process nationwide remains high.
According to a CBS News poll conducted across the country in July and August, just 25% of Republican voters said they were "very confident" in their state's voting system, while 56% of Democratic voters expressed high confidence in the system.
For Arntz, who has overseen the city's elections department for 23 years, efforts to sow doubt in this process is personal.
"People are always trying to find reasons to put doubt in people's minds about these systems, about the election process," he explained. "It's frustration, but there are points where a lot of anger happens on my side too, because the damage is being done to the election process."
To provide transparency to the public, the department has organized livestreams that are available to the public of the logic and accuracy testing of all of their equipment including ballot sorting and processing.
But despite any skeptics, he remains 100% confident — just like his systems — this election will be accurate and secure.
"I think elections are important in how communities view themselves. If an election is run well in the community, I think the community has a better sense of itself," said Arntz. "And I think us being successful has a big part of San Francisco, in a way, being successful, and so it just kind of has momentum that way."