On Election Day, Arlington officials plan to have several layers of security in place to ensure all ballots are correct and accounted for.
With early voting now underway, Director of Elections Gretchen Reinemeyer posted a video (below) last week outlining the steps the county takes to arrive at an accurate count of all votes.
Before the first ballot is cast on Election Day, the county’s electoral board certifies two numbers on each piece of voting equipment.
One is the “protective counter number” — a running tally the number of votes that have been cast on each machine over the course of its lifetime. The other is the “public counter number,” a tally of votes during this election only.
“Before they’re sent out to precincts on Election Day, the election officers want to check that both of these numbers match what was recorded by the electoral board first thing election morning — and they want to make sure that public counter number is zero,” Reinemeyer said.
Later that day, when voters begin to insert their ballots into scanners, equipment photographs both sides of each ballot to validate it and make sure it’s a ballot printed by Reinemeyer’s office for use in this election.
The machine then saves a copy of each ballot in two separate places, located within the device.
“At the end of the day, election officers run results from each scanner,” Reinemeyer said. “They then record both that public and protective counter again on their statement of results, certifying that a certain number of voters came to vote at their precinct on Election Day.”
After Election Day, Arlington’s electoral board reviews and verifies all paperwork during a process called the “canvass.”
Local election security has come into focus in recent weeks after the Office of the Commonwealth’s Attorney for Arlington and Falls Church announced that it is stepping up measures “to ensure safe and fair elections.”
The prosecutor’s office has established a task force “to rapidly respond to and investigate any reports of voter intimidation, interference, or fraud.” It also plans to have additional prosecutors on call on Election Day “to swiftly address any legal issues that may arise at polling places.”
That announcement came a few weeks after the Republican National Committee and the Trump campaign co-hosted a training in Clarendon for volunteer “observers” to watch for potential voter fraud at the polls.
The GOP-led “Protect the Vote” campaign is seeking to recruit 5,000 volunteers in Virginia to “be in the room whenever a vote is cast,” with the stated goal of preserving election integrity.
Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares (R) said there was no widespread voter fraud in the state in 2020, during the last presidential election year. Miyares created an “Election Integrity Unit” in 2022.
