Washington County Board of Elections Deputy Director Karen Pawloski and Director Mandy Amos discuss a sample local ballot for the Nov. 7 election with Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose during his October visit to the county elections office. (Photo by Nancy Taylor)

Easy to vote, hard to cheat.

That’s the way Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose likes to sum up Ohio’s voting track record, and it reflects election and vote-counting security precautions Ohio undertakes right down to the county level.

On a visit to Washington County in mid-October, LaRose discussed the state’s voting accuracy, 99.98% in 2020 and 99.9% in 2022, with those figures indicating the way post-election audits compared to initial declared results.

It has been even better in Washington County.

“Ours are always 100% when we do the audits,” Board of Elections Director Mandy Amos said Wednesday.

The security at the board of elections office on Davis Avenue begins with early voting and mail-in ballots. As with the regular election votes, those votes have a Republican representative and a Democratic representative present at all times the ballots are handled. Those votes are handled in a double-locked restricted area, where one lock must be opened by the designated Democrat holding the correct key, and the other lock opened with the key from the corresponding Republican.

In that double-locked room the Republican and Democratic counterparts have a computer that is never connected to the internet and a separate, caged, lockable part of the room that holds a high-speed scanner. Mail-in ballots are scanned there.

The mail-in and early voters are entered on a database that is distributed to the nine precincts on voting day, to prevent anyone from being able to vote twice.

There’s a second double-locked area of the board of elections office where voting machines are stored when they are not in use.

On election night, the board of elections staff gets a computer flash drive containing the results from each of the nine polling places in Washington County. The Democrat and the Republican (basically Amos and Deputy Director Karen Pawloski) get those loaded and compiled on the computer that is not connected to the internet. Later, they use another computer in the “cage” to build the ballots and transmit the resulting totals to the Secretary of State’s office.

The Secretary of State’s office has given the boards of election a process to use to check that the state’s final totals match their own.

Washington County also conducts its own audit. The members of the board of elections — chair Dennis Sipe and members Robin Bozian, Khadine Ritter and Charlie Wentz — select random precincts up to 5% of the total to examine. They check a hard copy of the election results against their findings. The election results and the election audit results are both posted.

Amos said the board of elections needed 120 workers for the nine polling places Nov. 7 and they’ve been able to get a few more than that number, in case there are slots to fill in emergencies. Both Democrats and Republicans will be able to use poll workers not affiliated with any party, if that is necessary.