Bar codes, special paper, fences and cameras keep counterfeit ballots out of NC count
In the wake of the 2020 elections, former President Donald Trump and a chorus of election deniers in several states alleged that ballots had been falsified and added into the total as votes were being counted. In Arizona, there was even a formal legislative inquiry into whether counterfeit ballots from China had swung the election.
While there's no proof that any ballots anywhere were counterfeited in the 2020 election, North Carolina voting officials say it would be just about impossible here.
"Counterfeit ballots are not happening," Wake County elections director Gary Sims told WRAL News.
What if someone got an absentee ballot and made copies of it? Couldn't they stuff the ballot box with the fake ballots?
First, you can’t just photocopy a mail-in absentee ballot. It has a bar code that identifies who it was sent to, and so does the envelope you have to use to send it back. So it wouldn’t be hard to figure out who tried to commit fraud, which is a felony under state law.
"Those ballots are very specific to your residential address," Sims said. "There is tracking information on those ballots, and those have to be the official ballots. And even when you return it, everything is bar-coded to make sure that what we're getting back is the actual ballot."
Couldn't falsified ballots be added in during in-person voting?
Elections officials say that wouldn't work, either. Every voted ballot is checked and cross-checked to make sure it was legally cast. At the end of each day, at early voting or on Election Day, the number of voters who came in to vote at every site is checked against the number of ballots that were issued and counted. If there’s a disparity, poll workers would see it.
Sims says it would also be virtually impossible for anyone to get any illicit ballots counted after election day. All ballots are kept in a locked cage with floor-to-ceiling fencing, limited badge access, security cameras and motion detectors to alert law enforcement if someone should manage to get through a series of secure checkpoints to break into the room where they're stored.
Even if you could find a way past all those safeguards, Sims says, the tabulating machine wouldn’t even read a fake ballot anyway.
"Believe it or not only a certain size cut and type of paper will even work in our tabulators. This has to do with the brightness, the thickness and everything else," Sims said. "And then on top of that, there is a special coating on a ballot to make sure that our tabulator is only going to read the correct one."
