Election Integrity in Florida -- Vicki Davis, Supervisor of Elections, on the Front Lines

The Martin County Florida Supervisor of Elections Office is on the front lines. The battle is over the perception of Election Integrity as Florida and the entire United States heads into the Mid-term Elections. 

Supervisor of Elections Vicki Davis spent time recently with the grey-haired host of the Great American Senior Show, Sam Yates, to share real information and, hopefully, dispel some of the rumors and myths that have grown in intensity in recent months about the validity of elections.

In this, the second of multiple sessions with Vicki Davis, we learn how there were attempts by the Russians to penetrate and disrupt elections and how those Russian attempts to alter our most democratic process resulted in even tighter standards for voting protection.

In the process, we also put to rest the thought (by many) that setting up, conducting, and verifying elections is an easy process. Or, one that does NOT take a full time effort or around the clock diligence to make sure our elections are fair, unhampered, and untampered. 

Transcript

Sam Yates: 0:12

Hello, everyone, and welcome to another exciting edition of The Great American Senior Show. I'm your grey haired host, Sam Yates, and I am back in Martin County, Florida, the Supervisor of Elections Office, Vicki Davis, welcome back to the program.

Vicki Davis, Supervisor of Elections: 0:25

Oh, it's my pleasure, Sam, it we we've had great conversations in the past. And I don't expect anything less out of this way.

Sam Yates: 0:34

You know, I consider you one of the foremost authorities on our local and state election process. And we're going to jump into that, because a lot of the things we talked about today here from Martin County are applicable throughout the entire state of Florida. But before I do that, the one of the reasons that you are that authority is because you've been doing this job so well, for

Vicki Davis, Supervisor of Elections: 0:59

quite a number of years. Yeah, I've been in this position. This is my 18th year. And it's it's a position that I really look at as serving my community in in a capacity that is foundational for our nation.

Sam Yates: 1:18

And I think the way that you've raised that foundational for our nation, has integrity, written all over it. And a lot of folks today based on whatever have questioned our voter integrity, you know, should we be worried

Vicki Davis, Supervisor of Elections: 1:36

in this, you know, I can't speak for the other states, because elections is a decentralized process. We do have federal oversight, somewhat. But our main oversight is through Florida law in the state of Florida. And, and I can speak for the state of Florida and for Martin County that all of my 666 additional supervisors of elections, we work extremely hard to make sure that we get it right. Since the election of 2000. Florida became under the spotlight, not just because of what happened in 2000, with the recount with the presidential election. But because Florida has been a swing state with electoral votes. For so many years, the media can always predict how California is going to vote, they can always predict how Texas is going to vote. And for a number of years, Florida was tied with electoral votes with New York State, and they could predict how New York is going to vote. But now we're in that third place because we picked up additional and additional electoral vote. So we're still under that spotlight because our registration in the state of Florida, for voters is almost equal. Just in the last few months, the Republican registered voters have inched past democratic registered voters in the state of Florida, but then you have to factor in all of those voters that are registered with no party affiliation. We are are going to continue to be under that spotlight for for some time to come.

Sam Yates: 3:31

Is the no party affiliation, one of the most rapid growing

Vicki Davis, Supervisor of Elections: 3:35

sectors, it is and it's not just in the state of Florida, but it is a national trend.

Sam Yates: 3:42

And any reason why thoughts on that,

Vicki Davis, Supervisor of Elections: 3:45

you know, I, I think it's because of our younger generation coming up behind those of us that are a Baby Boomer and, and we know the importance of getting out to vote in and we've, we were raised under a party system within our own homes, you know, but these kids, they thought they are independent thinkers. And instead of registering the way mom and dad have registered, they're electing to go, no party affiliation. So that's a large chunk of of the reason why we have such a high rate in no party affiliates, but then other voters are just electing not to be associated with either one of the major parties.

Sam Yates: 4:34

You mentioned 2000 And what we went through as far as the voter recount 2016 We also had some intrusion by the Russian

Vicki Davis, Supervisor of Elections: 4:45

that we did. Yeah, in 2016. And, you know, we were going through the primary election in in the state of Florida. As we get closer to elections, we're having monthly calls with the Division of elections and all of a sudden And we're starting to hear about this, you know, probing that's taking place nationally. And it wasn't until after the actual general election that we, we found out that there was probing that took place in Illinois. By the Russians, they were able to get into not their voting systems, but their voter registration database. And ever since then, since the election of 2016, as of January 2017, elections came under the umbrella of the Department of Homeland Security, elections were designated as critical infrastructure. So it's a good thing that we have the Department of Homeland Security as resources, they don't oversee our election process. They're simply there as a resource to help us in the category of cybersecurity and also physical security for our election offices.

Sam Yates: 6:09

That also made some changes to physical plant for your office here, and I'm sure all over the state, what kind of changes resulted?

Vicki Davis, Supervisor of Elections: 6:19

Well, for our office, we received a federal grant, which came down through the state all 67 supervisors in Florida were offered grant dollars. And if you were to drive up to our office, you would see black bollards up in front of the office. And if you were to go around to the east side of the building, we have a large generator, on the side of the building, and there are bollards around around the generator. And that was one of the recommendations through a physical security walkthrough by a member an agent from the Department of Homeland Security. The bollards are to protect my staff up front to protect the front, from any type of vehicle coming into the building itself, tried to slow it down somewhat same thing with the generator. They also recommended a number of additional cameras throughout the building and on the outside of the building. We through a federal grant, we were able to replace all of the glass, including doors, on our building with hardened glass for extra security measures. So yeah, you have to think outside of just cybersecurity, which is a huge issue. But think physical security as well how to protect the building, how to protect the warehouse, where the equipment is stored, where ballots are stored, that were required by law, federal and state law to maintain and retain for 22 months, you know, so all of those different scenarios have to be factored in.

Sam Yates: 8:03

And I would imagine that it was a good thing. Ultimately, it was it was bad that the Russians, for whatever reason wanted to penetrate our voting system, our voting, the sanctity of your vote, they got into some database, but they were halted. And some good came out of it.

Vicki Davis, Supervisor of Elections: 8:22

Yeah, I mean, every elections office in the state of Florida, and I would say even nationally, have really worked to increase firewalls, zero tunnels. And we all in the state of Florida, all 67 supervisors of elections have an Albert detection device. It's an intrusion detective device, which is monitored by the Center for Internet Security out of the state of New York. In their monitoring, they see a lot of activity from a certain IP address, we're immediately notified, and we would shut our system down. Thankfully, nothing like that has happened here in the state of Florida. But, you know, the Russians are kind of signaling even now that they have their eye on this election cycle, and especially the 2024.

Sam Yates: 9:16

And I think, based on what is going on in Europe, the Ukraine war, the Putin war, as as many people are calling it, that's going to keep everyone on their toes for, as you say, probably well into the next presidential election.

Vicki Davis, Supervisor of Elections: 9:31

Oh, for sure. And it seems that the three countries that we really have a lot of that do a lot of monitoring from the three, three top countries would be Russia, China and Iran for elections.

Sam Yates: 9:51

So we've gotten a lot of that behind us now. And so I wanted people to understand that their voting is secured their votes. secured. Let's talk about the process itself. We touched upon it in our previous episode, but we have some very important dates

Vicki Davis, Supervisor of Elections: 10:08

coming up. Yeah, August 23 is the primary election. For those that do vote by mail. We are required by federal law and also then Florida law because Florida has to codify what what the federal government puts in place. For the most part. We mail our ballots to our military and overseas voters 45 days before an election 40 days for those that live domestically within the United States. So voters that do vote by mail elect to vote by mail, they like to know when their ballots going to go out. So jot down take note 40 days prior to an election, your ballots going to go out in the mail, and 29 days prior to an election is the last day that someone can register as a new voter, or change their party and the party change is very important in the state of Florida because we are a closed primary state

Sam Yates: 11:14

in that vote for mail process just to make sure our folks know and who are listening, you have to request it. There is not a blanket mailing of ballots out to anyone you have to request to vote by mail,

Vicki Davis, Supervisor of Elections: 11:26

we've always in the state of Florida had to request a vote by mail ballot. The state of Florida has never just blanket sent out ballots to every registered voter, which I think is a really good safeguard that's in place.

Sam Yates: 11:41

I think that's important to know, because we have had such an influx of people into our state, from other states. So that's important that they know two things. voter registration drives and seniors who may be in a facility, whether it be a nursing home or assisted living, touch on those.

Vicki Davis, Supervisor of Elections: 12:03

Yeah. voter registration drives were always out in the community and my community outreach coordinator, Currie Anderson, is constantly out in the community, you know, it feels so good to be able to be back out in the community, Sam, because for two years, we were not able to be out there and you know, interfacing with our voters, we enjoy that process and curIs a natural at it. So we are we have a calendar of events and where the drives are going to be held on our website at Martin votes.gov. For nursing homes, assisted living elf facilities, we do go in Currie goes in to those facilities and registers individuals to to vote or change their address, and or have them fill out a form for a vote by mail. ballot. And then we do have supervised voting, she will go back in with a team of poll workers, for those individuals to actually vote their ballots and help them through that process.

Sam Yates: 13:20

This is all such a huge process. You have nine employees if I recall, right, correct. And it could not be accomplished unless you had other people who step forward and say, I would like to be a poll worker, I would like to take part of the process in some way. How could what are the positions and how could someone do that?

Vicki Davis, Supervisor of Elections: 13:41

Yeah, we need help in the area of of working as a poll worker through early voting for Election Day, which is a very long day, we kind of lose some of our voters there when they find out the hours and I will let Carrie share that in a different episode. And we need help at the ballot boxes, drop boxes, monitoring that process. We always hire temp staff to answer phones for us. And we hire temp staff I hire temp staff to help us with the canvassing process because that's a whole nother process in and of itself. When we receive those vote by mail ballots back in house. We are required by Florida law to verify every signature on every ballot envelope with the signature in our database or signatures in our database. And so we need temp staff for that but when those ballots go before the canvassing board, we need a team of individuals that one will slit the ballots open. It goes to a table individuals will sit there and remove the ballot from the envelope and then those ballots go to the high speed tabulator for tabulation and Currently, for the upcoming primary, we have over 30,000 requests in the system. Yeah, already. So it takes time, it takes time to run those those ballots and it's open to the public. People can come in and watch the process, watch the tabulation process. And individuals can always come in, we're required by statute to pre test every piece of equipment that we have that's going to be deployed into the field prior to every election. Plus, we have to publicly test a number of those pieces of equipment. So the public can come in during that process and watch the testing of the equipment.

Sam Yates: 15:41

And I certainly want to say for those who want to watch the process or want to come in and be observers, I'm going to ask that you put on your adult hat and be an adult, one of my pet peeves. People act like absolute, and I'm choosing my words very carefully. They act like idiots sometimes. And the other word that I wanted to use, I won't use because this isn't an adult program, but be an adult, and be on your best behavior, because these people are working so hard to make sure that your right to vote is sacred.

Vicki Davis, Supervisor of Elections: 16:21

Absolutely. And that is the preeminent goal that we work towards is making sure that the entire process is safe. It's secure. It's transparent, and reliable and credible all at the same time. Accurate. You know,

Sam Yates: 16:42

I know that I asked earlier. And I'm watching that we're getting close to wrapping up our second episode, I want to come back and talk with Carrie. I know that she has an excellent story to tell. And as a matter of fact, she has that title storyteller. And I'm going to ask her why she has that title and let her do a bit of explanation. But before we go, any additional item that we really haven't touched on that is critical that we should touch.

Vicki Davis, Supervisor of Elections: 17:09

Yeah, I would really like to leave voters with the thought and and the knowledge that the voting equipment is not connected to the internet. So you don't have to worry about the equipment where you cast your vote. You placed your ballot through that. That piece of voting equipment, that scanner that it's going to be tampered with because it is not ever connected to the internet.

Sam Yates: 17:43

Decentralized right down to the local level. Yeah, absolutely. Vicki my sincerest thanks for being here on the program. We have gone many years without sitting face to face. And now we're back. And you know, it feels good to know what you're doing and that you're continuing to do that wonderful job. So I look forward to having you back in the future as we get a little closer to election time, perhaps. And what are the things that I think is probably very important. I'm going to put in the request now post election so that we could do a little bit of a debrief. Oh, what what last thought? projections. I know that in the the last presidential we had 84% turnout locally correct. In this area here of Martin County. So Boston projections for voter turnout for our Martin County residents.

Vicki Davis, Supervisor of Elections: 18:33

Yeah, for Martin County, we're projecting between 36 to 40% turnout for the primary, which please, if you're a primary voter, encourage your neighbors encourage your family to get out and vote because many of our local elections are determined in that primary election. So it really is a very important election participate in the next one is our general election on November the eighth. And we're predicting a 60 to 65% turnout, which would be which would be a great turnout for a mid year election term. But, Sam, thank you for being so interested in this process and interested in getting correct information out to your listeners. It's so important. We as election officials do like to to say that we are the official source for election information, please utilize that.

Sam Yates: 19:32

I think that is so important with so much disinformation that you are the official source. And and I have to say that I'm taking great joy in this thing called podcasting that is opening up so many doors to get information out. And if you ever need that tool, I'm here at your disposal.

Vicki Davis, Supervisor of Elections: 19:52

Absolutely. Yes, thank you, Sam,

Sam Yates: 19:54

you're a superhero.

Vicki Davis, Supervisor of Elections: 19:55

Likewise,

Sam Yates: 19:56

there's a story behind that but we won't go into it today. So Thank you for being here. We're gonna be back here at the Martin County Supervisor of Elections Office at some point in the very near future. And until that episode, I'm your gray haired host of The Great American Senior Show. And that's the way our program ends.