Ep. 16: Barbara Smith Warner, Executive Director, National Vote at Home Institute

The Ballot Box Briefing is a weekly segment on Sirius XM’s The Briefing, that examines the issues and storylines at the heart of running an efficient and accurate election. Guests include election administrators, local, state, and federal officials, cybersecurity experts, legal analysts, and members of BPC’s Democracy Program.

Episode 16. Barbara Smith Warner discussed efforts by the National Vote at Home Institute to increase access to vote-by-mail, the security features of mail ballots, and the impacts of mail voting for increasing voter turnout.

Transcript

The following interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Steve Scully (SS): And every Friday we take a much deeper dive into the issues shaping this election, election security and the confidence you need to know about the results. We are pleased to welcome back Barbara Smith Warner. She is the former Majority Leader of the Oregon House of Representatives and the Executive Director of the National Vote at Home Institute. Barbara, so glad to have you. Thank you so much for being with us.  

Barbara Smith Warner (BSW): Pleasure to be here. 

SS: Let’s remind our listeners about the Vote at Home Institute, why it was formed and what’s your mission? 

BSW: The National Vote at Home Institute—we work to increase voters’ access to, confidence in, and use of voting at home. Voting at home (is) what your listeners may think of as absentee voting or voting by mail. Basically, we call it voting at home because that’s what it is. It’s when you get a ballot delivered to you and you have a couple weeks to do just that—vote at home. You get to kind of look at your ballot, talk with your family, look up questions you might have online, and then you can return it in any number of secure ways through a dropbox, in person, through the mail. You can track your ballot so that you know that it’s been returned, and it’s basically a really secure, safe way to vote so that you don’t have to worry about being sick on Election Day or having to work or not being able to find your polling place or having long lines. We think it’s the best way that centers the voter in the voting process and we’re great believers in it here at the National Vote at Home Institute. 

SS: So you’re the expert, not me, but it does seem possibly ripe for critics and the chance for fraud and some shenanigans. So how do you ensure that it is secure, that it is safe, that it’s fair. 

BSW: Most—not most—all of the arguments against it are pretty much made-up. The most important thing to know about voting at home is there’s no such thing as copying ballots. Every ballot is connected to a single voter. There’s bar codes that tie every individual ballot to one individual voter. That ballot is checked when it comes back to make sure it is connected to one voter. What we consider a best practice is signature verification. Your signature on the envelope is checked against the signature that’s on file with your local elections official. If there’s a question, they reach out to you and have you confirm that it really was you. How do we know that that works? Because every year a few people—and I do say few—kind of get caught for trying to vote someone else’s ballot. Occasionally it’ll be someone who has passed away and somebody has thought, oh, they won’t notice and they sign it and they get caught. Or, the always popular “oh, I’ll just send this ballot in for my kid while they’re at school.” And the way we find out that that happens is because people get caught. The truth is that it’s quite secure. There’s no copying ballots. Here in Oregon, we have been voting this way for 24 years. It’s not a blue thing or a red thing. It’s all across the country. Utah has been voting this way for more than 10 years. Vermont votes this way. Eight states and DC do all their voting this way. And we’ve all found it quite a safe way with very high turnout as a result. 

SS: We’re talking to Barbara Smith Warner. She is a former politician, a recovering politician perhaps, but now the Executive Director at the National Vote at Home Institute. We do just about everything on our laptop and our smartphone. What are the chances at some point with that same bar code-type technology, we could vote from our phone? 

BSW: We don’t advocate for that right now because the other element that does add to the security of voting at home is the paper ballot. If you talk to folks about what makes voting at home secure, it is that paper ballot element. That is a concern about so-called online voting that many people worry about—Internet security and how easily it could be hacked. When you have a paper ballot that comes from a voter, you’re not going to have that problem. And yet, when you are talking about young people who are used to having things sent to them, whether it’s DoorDash or Amazon, mailing a ballot to them seems like a perfectly reasonable thing. It shows up at your door, shows up in your mail. It makes sense to just turn around, and it’s easier to vote than it is to not vote when it shows up at your door. But we stay focused on using that paper ballot, having that security of the bar codes and the signature verification to make it secure, and having that clear chain of custody, and making sure that it was voted by who it’s showing as having been voted by. 

SS: As I mention often, I’m from Pennsylvania and it has I think a rather restrictive primary process—you can only vote if you’re a Democrat or a Republican in each of those respective party primaries. So, independents are shut out of the primaries. There’s also that Federal Appeals Court ruling, which declined to reconsider back in March, a ruling that election officials in the Keystone State are essentially barred from counting mail in ballots that arrive on time, but may have inaccurate dates or no dates written on the envelope. What is your assessment of that? 

BSW: We disagree with that ruling….  There’s a materiality clause in the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that we think should be used in that decision. We believe that if you have followed the most basic elements—you have signed your ballot, you’ve sent it in, it’s been received on time, it has been proven to be you, your signature. We don’t think that immaterial issues like that should be part of it. And I’ll tell you another interesting thing about Pennsylvania. One of the elements that we think is very important to having a safe and secure mail ballot process is that curing policy – the ability to cure your ballot if something’s wrong with it. A state that does this really well is Colorado. In Colorado, if your ballot comes back and something’s wrong, they have a great system called text to cure. They will text you and say, hey, something’s going on with your ballot. You can text them back with a picture of yourself, picture of your ID, and you can cure most problems with your ballots that way. It’s a statewide standard. Pennsylvania, on the other hand, it’s a county-by-county decision. So in all 67 counties, they get to decide whether your ballot can be cured and how it can be cured. I would argue that that is a bigger issue in the state of Pennsylvania is to establish a statewide decision on that, rather than leaving it to the counties. But indeed, we disagree and think that if the basics of voting have been established… we always believe that you should err on the side of inclusion and voter enfranchisement. 

SS: Barbara, every week here on this segment of the program, we call it the Ballot Box Briefing. I ask this one question and so I’m going to pose it to you: if there is one thing that you wish people either understood or knew better about elections, what would it be? 

BSW: I think working in the vote-at-home space, I think that the really transformative thing about voting at home is that it centers the voter in the process. I never thought about this much until I started to do this work. But right now—we talk about voting being the basis of our Democracy, right? And yet in a lot of ways, we make it pretty darn hard to vote. We pick a day, a random Tuesday in November to do our voting. And then, you got to go out and figure out where your voting place is. First, you got to register. You have to have remembered to register some amount of time beforehand, right? In my perfect world, if you really believe that voting is a right, you should want it to be as easy as possible. So to me, I think that elections, if they truly are the foundation of our Democracy, I think they should be as easy as possible. I think they should be as accessible as possible. So in my perfect world, that’s why I believe so much in voting at home because it centers the voter. You don’t have to go out and get your ballot. Your ballot comes to you, your vote comes to you. You, the voter, are centered in the process. And that’s how I would like people to think about elections. It really is all about you. So everything you can do to make you the center of the election is the best thing that you can do to make those elections work better. 

SS: And my argument, if you don’t vote, you don’t have a right to criticize and complain. Barbara Smith Warner. Tell us about how people learn more about the National Vote at Home Institute? 

BSW: Easy as can be, www dot vote at home dot org, and we just recently put up our latest tool called how Americans vote at home. So all 50 states, if you want to know how you can vote at home in your state, because again, in every state, they just make it easier or harder. If you live in an ‘excuse required’ state, you can click on your state and find out what those excuses are. If there’s no excuse, you can find out what your deadlines are. Just go to vote at home dot org and check it out. 

SS: Barbara, thank you again. Barbara Smith Warner joining us from Portland, Oregon, we appreciate it. 

BSW: My pleasure. Good to talk to you again, Steve.