About those extra mail-in ballots? Don't try to vote with them

Carl Rieckmann, a former Daily Inter Lake reporter and editor from the 1980s, who is now retired and recently returned to the Flathead, contacted me to let me know he was puzzled by a discovery he made in his mailbox last week.

“Imagine the surprise,” he wrote, “when my wife opened our mail today and discovered we had received official ballots for the school trustee election not only for my wife and me but also for the previous two owners of the house at this address that we had purchased in December 2016.”

That led to a discussion between Carl and myself about how exactly would the Election Department handle such a situation if perchance someone at the home were not as honest as Carl and decided to vote three times.

I put the question to Monica Eisenzimer, who is the Flathead County election and recording manager in the County Clerk’s Office.

“I’m so glad you asked,” Monica told me when I reached her by phone. “We love to answer people’s questions about what we do.”

First of all, she explained that the registration rolls are updated based on information provided by voters. If someone moves without letting the election office know, then a situation like Carl and his wife experienced may occur.

“Usually, it comes back as undeliverable,” Eisenzimer said. “Then we mark it on their registration so they become inactive and can’t vote.”

If the post office does deliver it to the person’s former address, and someone like Carl returns it, that too will be marked as inactive.

But what if an unscrupulous person got several ballots mailed to their address under different names and they tried to vote more than once? How would the election office know?

“If a ballot comes to us for a mail election, we check the signature on the outside envelope. We verify every one of them. We check the signatures as soon as they come in,” Eisenzimer said.

All right, so just how many people try to cheat the system by voting more than once or under someone else’s name?

“We’ve never had a fraudulent signature,” Eisenzimer told me. She should know. She’s been working elections for 12 years now.

She added that election officials do catch some discrepancies, such as when a parent tries to sign the ballot for their children, or when a husband or wife signs their name on their spouse’s ballot. Those are handled by a phone call and having the correct person come to the office to sign the ballot. If they don’t get signed, those ballots are discarded.

Another issue is that some people’s signatures change over time and are no longer recognizable.

“Sometimes people registered to vote when they were 18 or 21, and now they are 75, and their signature has changed,” Eisenzimer said. “If we reject them, then they have to come in and correct it. If they don’t we reject it.”

Signature cards have all been digitized, so that Eisenzimer and her staff can verify signatures very easily by calling them up on their computers.

Eisenzimer said that concerns about mail ballots are misplaced.

“I feel it is actually more secure to do a mail ballot because we have the signature right in front of us. But when voters go to a polling place to vote, the precinct workers look at an ID, but they don’t have a signature to compare.”

In addition, some of the items that the law allows voters to present to prove their identity do not include either a picture or a signature such as a utility bill.

So it turns out that Carl and I may have been worried over nothing. There are no doubt areas where voter security can be improved, but keeping track of mail-in ballots doesn’t appear to be one of them.