You found the backup wrap up your go-to podcast for all things
backup recovery and cyber recovery.
In this episode, however, we're taking a little detour from our usual backup
talk to dive into something that's been on a lot of people's minds lately.
Election integrity, having worked several primaries and elections as a poll worker,
I've got some insider knowledge on how our voting system actually works.
We're gonna break down the whole process from paper ballots to mail-in voting, and
all the checks and balances in between.
I'll debunk some of the wild theories out there and show you
why it's practically impossible to pull off large scale voter fraud.
If you care about election integrity, this is your episode.
By the way, if this is your first time listening to us, I
am w Curtis Preston, AKA, Mr.
Backup, and I've been passionate about backup and recovery for
over 30 years, ever since.
I had to tell my boss that we had no backups of the production
database that we had just lost.
I don't want that to happen to you, and that's why I do this.
On this podcast, we turn unappreciated backup admins into cyber recovery heroes.
This is the backup wrap up.
Welcome to the show.
If I could ask you to just take a quick second and click subscribe
or follow whatever platform you're watching or listening on.
Remember, you can watch us on YouTube, you can listen to us on your
favorite podcast player and, um, you know, if you subscribe or follow,
you'll always get our great content.
And I have with me my friend who can help celebrate the major project that I.
Have recently finished and by I, I mean the people I hired to finish the project.
You know, that's like 99.7% of my projects,
Meaning that you hire somebody to do
them.
Yeah.
they don't get done one of the two.
And it's, and it's, well, we'll see, we'll see if this continues.
It's just, I'm, I'm, I'm speaking of course of, you know,
completely redoing The
flooring and painting.
So it was half me and half the, the contractors and, um,
I painted all of the upstairs.
I got a new paint sprayer
Did you remember to clean it up by the way?
After you're done?
I did, of
course I did.
What is funny though is, you know, the, the
tip, you know, the tip is currently in the cup holder in my car.
I don't know why.
It just is.
Um,
and, um, no, I, yeah, me neither.
Um, and, uh, yeah, so the painting finished and then the, you know,
the, the flooring guy finished.
Uh, technically the flooring is at like 99%.
They've got a couple of little pieces of, uh, trim they're gonna
do.
Um, but it's, yeah, it's
Which, which for people who may not know, I think it was last year
or the year before you did all of the downstairs flooring yourself.
I did, I did do all of the downstairs flooring.
And you may recall that what I said after the end of that project,
uh, was I'm too old for this shit.
Um, and now that I'm currently, uh, suffering like some weird,
uh, meniscus thing going on on my
Are you sure it's, I, I, I heard it's, you know what I heard?
It's actually called
What?
Old Age.
Yeah, I am a year older than I did when I did, when I did the flooring down here.
Um, I will say I certainly miss the cost that I had down here, right?
Um, upstairs is somewhere between a half to two thirds of the size of downstairs
and I had, uh, $4,500 in labor alone.
Um,
But, but I think one other thing you should also be thankful of
is it didn't take two months.
it didn't take two months.
It took longer than I wanted it to.
Uh, for those who have ever hired contractors, they said they'd do it
in three to four days, and it was more like seven to eight days because,
you know, they had other projects and
things.
Right.
But, um,
But it looked good.
And it
and I didn't, yeah,
it looked great.
Um, and it, it's very weird to make that final transition
from carpet to, um, LVP, which
is luxury vinyl planking.
And, um, it is very weird, but it is so nice, so clean and, you know, um, I
missed the carpet on my feet, but I don't miss the lack of the cleanliness aspect.
Right.
Do you have a,
it's not a Rosie Juju.
B Judy.
GDB.
what
what is it, Judy?
What is that?
What, what?
room bug called?
Oh, oh, June.
Oh, that's Junie BI don't have a June.
Yeah, I don't have a Junie B for upstairs.
Um,
might be something
and currently June.
Currently Junie B is not working
actually.
Um, I need to spend some time with Junie B.
Give her a little bit of love.
Um, and,
um,
know it's Curtis's.
Roomba.
yeah, that's the name, that's the name for it.
Was it?
It was, um, it was, uh, my granddaughter named it Junie b Jones,
um, which is from the book, from the book series.
Hmm.
Uh, so I, we're gonna do something very, very different.
Uh, we've done
this before.
Yeah, I was gonna say it's, it's different but not different.
It's very, very diff I mean, unless you're an avid follower of the podcast and have
been listening for at least two years, you've never heard me talk about this.
Um, and it's a subject that's near and dear to my heart for multiple reasons.
More dear to your heart than backups.
Okay.
Outside of my career, it is, that is definitely a, um, you know, it, it is very
near and dear to my heart, and I, I want to sort of like, I'm an American, right?
I mean, I'm a very proud American and I, you know, we've
made, we've made our mistakes.
We continue to make our mistakes, right.
Um, and, but I am proud of what we have.
Acco, you know, many of the things that we've accomplished
on, and I'm a, and I'm proud of of things that we're trying to do.
And one of the things that I am really, really impressed with.
Is the American system of election, right?
Hey, what system?
What system exists?
What are you talking about?
so the way in which every two years we elect, you know, people, right.
You know, people are like, what do you mean every two?
You don't, you mean every four years?
No, I mean every two years.
Right?
Every two years.
We either have a presidential election or what we call the midterms, which is,
um, the, uh, when we, when we elect just senators or, um, house of Rep, you know,
members of the House of Representatives
Or
it could be your local representatives too.
That, that as well, right there, there could be local, there, there could
also be measures, you know, things.
Right.
Um, and the fact that we have, I think it was over 150 million
people voted in the last election.
Um, the fact that that happens and the fact that it's done in such
a way that allows you to vote and allows you to vote anonymously, 100%
anonymously and in a way that, like, it tracks that you voted right.
You can
not what
record, not what you voted right.
Not what you voted for.
but it tracks that you, that you voted in an election.
But it, but it, but yeah, but they don't know what, what, you know, what they voted
but Curtis, I, so right now it's October 14th when we're
recording this, right?
And the, uh, presidential elections are right around the corner.
Right.
Right?
And just like we heard four years ago and the
time before that, right?
Everyone always complains about the election, right?
They're like, oh, I'm voting on old school paper.
I don't trust the electronic
voting system because there's that entire hoopla about the dominion
voting systems and how they can
be hacked and everything in the world.
Like we talk on this podcast about ransomware and
hacking and everything else,
and yet we're putting our full faith in the system
that most people are not aware of, right?
No, right.
that is actually what is so amazing to me in that, let me draw an analogy.
Okay.
It, it's gonna sound bizarre at first, but you, you are, you
are aware of, of Taylor guitars.
Yep.
Okay, so Taylor guitars happen to be manufactured 100%.
Well, true.
Taylor guitars are manufactured 100% in San Diego, California.
Right.
They're ma measured, manufactured in El Cajon.
I've taken a tour of, of, of Taylor Guitar Factory, and I
say, I say truth Taylor Guitars.
There are Taylor guitars that are now made in Mexico, and I'm, I'm not
putting them in the same category.
Um,
they, um.
And they're, and those are made for a different price point
and all this stuff, right?
What I was amazed about with Taylor Guitar was their combined
use of old world craftsmanship and new world technology, right?
so?
where, where a, a human being can add value.
They used a human
being.
And where a computer or a robot could add value, not just
do it cheaper, but do it better, right?
Here's a perfect example.
Um, the, the applying lacquer.
To a finished guitar.
They have a robot that is the classic one armed
robot from a manufacturer.
It was an, it was a, it was made for cars,
okay.
And the first thing they had to do was to teach it how to
hold a guitar and not crush it.
Right?
They, they, they talk all about it, about how many guitars they destroyed.
Um, getting, teaching it to hold a guitar tight enough that you know,
that it doesn't go anywhere, but not too tight, you know, not so
tight that it crushes the guitar.
And they've programmed that to two things.
One is they patented a process of electro electrostatically
charging the guitar negatively.
Charging it.
Right.
And then positively charging the lacquer
very similar process to
go.
Yeah, go ahead.
Very
similar to powder coating.
Yep.
And, uh, and then moving the robot in exactly the right way so
that they, they apply a perfectly uniform coat of lacquer and also
reducing the amount of waste in the
process.
Right.
So when I look at elections, uh, and again, I, I, I, I can
speak with quite a level of
authority on how we do it in San Diego, but
Because
you've been doing this for how long?
because I've now participated as an election worker in every election and
every primary since the 2016 primary.
Okay.
So that's
several.
That's a lot.
Right.
Um, I have also, I.
Witnessed, you know, you, you, it, the, the entire process is open
and you can watch it at any time.
I've witnessed the process of how mail-in ballots are harvested.
I've, I've witnessed a process of how the, the, the ballot, the physical
ballots are counted, how the physical ballots are reconciled, and how, you know,
and, and how signatures are verified.
And I've seen, I, I'm pretty sure
every portion of the process on the backend, and I've physically participated
in the front end of every part of the
And, and you've also been a site manager multiple years, right?
And so I, you know, I'm, I'm a, I'm a site manager.
Um, this year I'll be the site manager.
Um, in fact, as I'm recording this, I'm, today, I, I went to my first
of three days of training, uh, to be
the site manager for
but
okay.
So as a site manager, you're basically running the voting
site or the election site,
Yeah.
you have a team under you, and you
have certain processes
that you have to follow, and certain things you have to know is three days
really enough time to learn everything?
Because you said you're in three days of training for site manager.
Yeah.
So, uh, I wish I had 10 days, but but what, what I can, what I can tell you is
that, and, and I think this is the overall message, and I don't want to get into
it, obviously in a little bit of detail.
The overall concept is that it's enough training given that you, um, you
have layers upon layers of checks and balances, um, so that you know when, when
somebody's trained to do a job, you know, in the classroom today, for example.
We had 29 poll workers that were, uh, being trained and,
and three site managers.
And in that 29, only five or six were the, it was their first time.
Right.
So there's this constant sort of recycling.
You have newer people, you have people that have done this
several times.
We have people in there that have been in an election since, you know, forever.
And, um, you look at me and many of the people in the room, we've done every
election since we started doing it,
the newer, uh, way.
And,
we'll talk about in a bit, but
yeah,
yeah, yeah.
Um, so Go ahead.
and the one other thing I wanted to cover though is even with the
three days, right, it's not like they're just like tossing you out
to C and being like, Hey, go at it.
Right?
They give you support, right?
Yeah.
The, the people that are, um, the trainers.
So the trainers by the way they go through, I.
A month of training to become trainers.
And, and by the way, I have some vision, I have some, uh, visibility
into that as well because my wife is a
trainer and so she has gone through a month of training to
do her first, uh, to, to do the
training.
And, and, and then they have support and they have, um, you know, they
have junior and senior people in the
training as well.
My wife is now, this is her third time doing training
Yeah.
and then,
go
and then even like the day of the, like when you're on site, right?
There's still people you can talk to if you needed
Yeah.
So all of those trainers, the moment they stop training, they go into support mode
and they become the poll worker hotline.
And, um, so they have to train, I don't know how many trainers they have.
So it, so in San Diego County we have 280, somewhere in the neighborhood of 280 vote
centers, and each of those vote centers is gonna have somewhere between seven to.
15 poll
workers.
So think about that.
280 sites, you know, let's say an average of
10 poll workers, that's
3000 people that you gotta train, right?
So they have a big team of trainers.
Um, and I, I, I think the, the overall thing that impresses me, and
by the way, in the room, so we get, you know, one of the first things
out of the mouth of the trainers is we're here to help people vote.
You are to represent, um, the registrar voters or the ROV.
You're not here to represent your political views.
Um, you, you are not a Republican or a Democrat or an independent
or a, you know what, whatever you, you are a poll worker and our job.
And, and, and it's amazing 'cause I, I participated in, in a few, in
enough of these, it's amazing to see.
People that are at political opposites of the, you know, or that they're at the
opposite ends of the political spectrum.
And you can, you spend enough time with 'em, you can kind of get an
inkling of where they fall politically.
You have enough conversations with 'em.
And by the way, uh, I'm at, I'm at an 11 day site.
There's a lot of chitchat and 11 day site.
'cause there's a lot of downtime.
Except the last couple
an idea.
Yeah.
Except the last couple of days, especially the, of election day.
Um, you kind of see, you can kind of get an idea where they fall politically.
And sometimes you might even, you might even, somebody might
slip who they might vote for.
But what's what's amazing is they all have an equal desire to.
Make this voting process a good one, right?
Uh, one with integrity, one that where the voter has a pleasant voting experience.
Um, and so when I do hear people saying, and I had, I had a really
interesting conversation with a, a, a, you know, a colleague the other day,
and he was really, he was, um, he was.
Saying things like, you, you, you know that there's got to be these problems.
And I'm like, no, I don't know it, and neither do you.
And tell me what you think is like your best idea of your evidence, right?
And, and let me explain to you why I don't see the things that you're
worried about are even possible.
Um, and so, so I thought, so, I thought we'd, you know, it,
it, it, we're recording this, like you said, October 14th.
I'm gonna put this as the next, uh, episode.
Even if it's not the one, the next one in rotation.
I'm gonna put this out because I want people to vote,
right?
I want you to vote.
I want, I, you know what I want you to do?
I want you to question the process, but I don't want you to question
the process like, you know.
Without talking to people that actually know what they're talking about, I want
you to go to your registrar voters or whatever they call it, they should call, I
think they all call 'em registrar voters.
Go to your ROV and ask questions.
Hey, I heard this.
Can you tell me?
Is this possible?
Right?
Um, I heard that people can stuff the ballot box with thousands of ballots.
Is that possible?
Right.
Um, I heard that.
Um, you know, the, and then people can like
can be counted after
Yeah.
after
Yeah.
The votes that, yeah.
And I'm concerned about, you can say things like, this is my concern.
I I have this problem.
One of the main problems that I think a lot of people that have been around
a few years is we have, and covid.
Covid drove this to some degree.
We have much more mail-in voting than we did before.
Right.
And, mail-in votes definitely take longer to process and count than old school
votes.
And so it takes longer to certify the election than it used to.
And we're used to going to bed on election night knowing the result,
or having a pretty good idea.
You know, the election has been called for so and so,
and that doesn't happen as
well, and especially given the numbers, right?
Just the sheer quantity it can sway an election.
Right.
It absolutely can't, you know, the elections, so many elections
have been very, very close.
Um, and, um, so I want you to, I want you to ask questions,
So I have some questions for you
since we're asking.
So one of the things that I've heard a lot of is people can go vote in one
place, go to a different place, vote that
because especially I.
I.
think that there was a slight reduction in the number of
vote centers, voting centers.
And sometimes they're not all connected together.
And like I know as an example, my neighborhood polling place
that I used to go to or vote center was in someone's garage,
Right?
right?
And um, after or during Covid that went away and now they just
have a couple central places like the library near my house.
They have one.
There you go, vote.
Yeah.
what
prevents me from going to one voting center, voting there, going to a different
voting center, voting there, going to yet another one all within my county,
especially since I don't have a dedicated place anymore like I used to.
Yeah.
So that's a great question.
So.
There are two ways that we have done voting, and I think most counties
have gone to the latter way.
The old way was the precinct style of voting.
You are assigned to a precinct, you have a voting location for that precinct.
You go there and there's a physical printed, um, poll book.
Your name is either in it or it's not in
it.
And then you say, I'm here to vote and I'm Prasanna Malaiyandi.
And depending on where you live, you may or may not be presenting voter
ID to prove that you're that person.
And then you, uh, and then you vote, you cannot go, uh, normally
you cannot go down the street.
Uh, or, or you know, let's say you work downtown, you can't go to a random garage.
You know where there, you know, many of these polling places were in very
small places, like someone's garage.
You cannot go to the, you know, a different garage and vote because your
name's not gonna be in the polling book.
Now, some states, some counties, would allow you to do what was called a
provisional vote under that thing of like, okay, I cannot make it to my.
My precinct, my normal place, I would like to vote provisionally.
And they would have a way of doing that.
And when we used to do it that way, there were tons of
provisional votes because of that.
I can't find this person in the roster.
Maybe they just went to the wrong polling place and we would do a provisional vote.
Right.
That's the old way, right?
Even with the provisional vote, so right.
It was marked as a provisional ballot such that when it got to the backend
where they were doing all the counting, they would just make sure that the
person did not vote twice, right?
right?
Yeah.
So when you do a provisional vote, there's lots of extra paperwork.
It goes into special envelope that goes into a special pile.
It gets special handling so that you make sure that that person doesn't vote twice.
Um, there are many downsides to that way.
Right?
One of them is, it's actually a lot harder to.
Manage the integrity of one or two people voting in, you know, managing voting in
a garage across thousands of locations.
Right.
That's actually quite hard.
It's easier to have a large team, right?
Um, and, and ensure that, you know, you, you, you have lots of training
and lots of support and all that stuff.
So it's actually easier to, to, to do a, a tighter process
with larger groups of people.
Um.
So what, so what we now do, at least, again, I can speak only with
authority with what we do in San Diego, but I'm, but from what I've
read, many counties around the country have done something very similar.
And that is, they've gone to an electronic poll book, they've gone to a smaller
number of vote centers, uh, where they're staffed by groups of people, like,
like what I was talking about earlier.
And they, um, you go to that vote center, they have an electronic poll
book, which is connected via a secure location to a database somewhere.
And then they can look you up in that database and they can see what part
of the county you live in, therefore what ballot you should receive.
And then they, um,
By that
you mean?
Uh, like if you have local measures or if you have
local candidates,
you, you wanna make sure you get the, the appropriate ballot for your neighborhood.
And, um.
And then they're able to give you access to that ballot.
There's a couple different ways that they do that.
Um, some, uh, counties, like right up the street, orange County,
California, they actually print out what I would call an old school.
Uh.
You know, ballot that you're, that you're, used to seeing, right?
And then you, you fill it out with bubbles and stuff, right?
And then, and then you turn that ballot in the way San Diego does it.
We u we use all BMDs ballot marking devices, these are provided by Dominion,
uh, that you go in and you mark your choices and then you tell you, you
can then review your choices and then you can print and then those choices
and print it out onto your ballot.
And the machine does not have a network connection.
The machine does not store any data.
Um, and the, the machine does not, you know, your, your votes are not,
I don't think there's any, I may be wrong, but there were some, San Diego
years ago did use a, a machine where, a voting machine where you made.
Your vote and then it.
stored the vote in that machine and then you print it out a tally.
I don't, I don't think anyone's doing that anymore.
Um, that definitely the election integrity.
People in general don't like that way.
They like this way.
And it's funny, you, you talked about the paper ballot.
The beauty of the paper ballot system is that it can be audited,
right?
So as long as you produce a paper ballot, and whether you're using the
mail-in ballot style, the old school mail-in ballot or the, the, the
BMD printed ballot, everyone has a paper ballot and we can track
all those paper ballots and we can go back and we can review, right?
So, um, the way it works, uh, here is that at the end of each voting
day, all of the BMD ballots and, and in California every registered
voter gets a ballot mailed to them.
They can either mail that in, they can drop it off at a mail-in, you know, vote
location, or they can actually rip the envelope up, bring in the printed ballot,
and they can bring it in and vote that ballot.
If they'd prefer to do that, instead of use the BMD, that's fine as well.
Again, we just want people to
vote, right?
Or they can come in and use the BMD and um, and then they get a printed ballot.
In every case, it's a paper ballot, right?
Then all of the paper ballots that we are given as a site, we then
put it in, uh, a ballot carton, and it's sealed for that night.
It immediately goes to, uh, we call it dart.
Uh, I can't remember what DART stands for.
It's something about recovery team like.
It's something, um,
But someone
comes and picks that up.
Right.
Well, we, they, there's a
location where all of the vote centers, um, in, in an area have a
location that they, they go to dart.
There's a van
with multiple people in it at all times.
All ballots have multiple people, um, with them.
Right.
There's a van.
That van, as soon as all of the sites in that area that are supposed to
go to that, that location, that van then immediately goes to, uh, the ROV
It
peels out and does a little burnout and
hauls,
and it goes to the ROV and they report that they're leaving for the ROV.
You know, when we, when, when our votes, when our ballots leave our
site to go to dart, we call the ROV, we are leaving to go to dart.
And then we're the, okay, we're
you know?
You know what I'm thinking of?
I'm thinking
of like the secret service with the president on my way to dart.
Yeah.
Well, that's what we do.
Right?
Um, and, um, Eagle is leaving.
Um.
And then when they, when they gather all of the appropriate ballots
from that area, then that then they are, then they notify, you know,
uh, ROV, that they're on the way.
And then when they get there, they, they, they do that and then they take each
ballot carton is kept, all those ballots, whether they're mail ballots or, or,
well, they're, uh, we call 'em a carry in ballot, meaning a ballot that was mailed
to somebody, but they brought in and voted it in person, or it's a BMD ballot.
They're all kept in that carton.
Why does that matter?
At some point that that carton is tallied.
Right.
Um, it, it's always after.
It's always, once election day happens, they don't count the votes
Oh, oh, sorry.
Do you count how many are in that
Thank Yeah, thanks for, yeah.
So yeah, that's, that's part of the, that's part of the,
the checks and balances.
We know how many I.
Uh, carry in ballots.
People brought in, we know how many BMD ballots were printed out.
We know it by which BMD, you know, how many ballots each BMD printed.
We add all that up and we're like, we got 150 of these, we got
120 of those, how many we have?
270.
Great.
So it's not possible for somebody to come in and put even one ballot
and have all the numbers add up.
Right.
Um, certainly not possible for someone to put hundreds or thousands of ballots in.
Right.
Um,
What, uh, so I would, one question,
since you talked about adding ballots, what about not putting a ballot in?
So that would be someone that sort of disenfranchised themselves,
Oh,
or sorry.
Is there something, some check in the system to prevent,
say, a poll worker acting
Uhhuh?
and not accepting a ballot from
Yes.
Right.
So, so the, um.
Um, first off, I will say that the person accepting the ballots
has no idea what's on the
Mm-Hmm.
right?
They, they're, they're given a piece of paper and a privacy seat.
They have no idea.
Um, and the voter is watching them as they're handing the stuff, and
so they're putting it in there.
There are also processes where we, you know, we there, the, the first voter
process where the voter comes in and verifies that the, that the ballot box
is empty.
We lock the ballot box.
Then each voter that comes up, they're, they're watching us put
their ballot in the ballot box.
And, um, so I don't see how a vote, how a poll worker could get away with
leaving one out.
And even if they wanted to do that, they wouldn't know which ones to leave out.
yeah.
The other thing is also, I think you've told me before that the
person checking someone in is different than someone in the back.
Right?
So
Yes.
It, it's a whole team, right?
You got people checking people in.
You got people doing, giving
them the ballots.
You got people ma managing the BMDs, and you got people
managing the ballot box.
And at all times there's, there's at least two people, you know,
whenever there's ballots, right?
Um, and so, yeah, so any, any, anything where the numbers would not add up would
be glaring, right?
Yeah.
Um, and then, so then all those go back and then they go into a carton
and they stay with that carton.
And each carton, they know that this carton came from this vote
center, vote center number 1 53 from, November, whatever.
Um, and they know how many ballots are in that carton, right?
Then that carton is counted and those ballots go back in that carton.
So it's
always kept together, right?
Always kept in that carton.
Why does that matter?
Because then at the end of the process, once all of the votes have been counted,
And by the
way, That's, automatic, right?
The accounting.
yeah, it is automated.
Thank you for bringing that up.
It is an automatic counting process, but here's the thing.
We need to double check.
That the, that the machines are doing, the computers that are doing the counter,
that are doing what they're supposed to be doing, that they're not flipping votes
like has been suggested by some
people, right?
We need to, you know, or they're not just making mistakes, they're
not doing it maliciously, but they're just making mistakes.
So you need a human check to the computer process.
And so the way we do it here in San Diego is we take, and I think this is actually
dictated by California law, and so each of the state or each of the counties
is doing, um, this, you do a 1% manual
check.
So you take 1% of those cartons, you take that carton, you know, and they
just go up randomly to the shelf and they grab up 1% of the cartons.
They then, um.
They sit around a table and you have one person reading the ballot, and
then, then other people that are marking down tallies and then they
have no idea what the count is.
And they, they literally go measure by measure, uh, candidate by candidate.
They say, who, who, you know this person voted for what?
And then, uh,
people num number up the tallies and then they check those tallies against
the computer tally of that carton.
And if there's anything that's off it sets up all kinds of alarm and could, if there
were, you know, massive I irregularities, it would trigger a much bigger
yeah.
And so just so people understand the scale in San Diego County, 1%
of votes is approximately how many
that's a great question.
Hang on.
So I just took a quick look and it was in the last election, 1.7 million
votes were cast in San Diego County.
And that doesn't mean, so it's the 1% check is 1% of the cartons,
Lot of
the votes.
Yeah.
Not of the votes.
So they take a look at the however many cartons that they have.
They take 1% of those cartons that would come out to, did I
get the math right about 17?
Like if it was evenly distributed, it'd be about 17,000
votes.
Yeah.
And it takes several days, by the way
to do that.
because you, like you said, you're doing across the entire
ballot for every candidate,
for every measure or every position and every measure.
Right.
And all the
Right.
And again, um, and that's done to ensure that the computers that
are doing work for us are doing what they're supposed to be doing.
Right.
One of the things I remember you had mentioned is you had talked about sort
of wanting to know the process Right.
And making sure, and I think you went and actually observed
them counting the boxes, right?
yeah, yeah.
Um, by the way, we use the term cartons,
boxes are a different thing.
sorry.
Yeah,
So it's a ballot box, ballot carton.
These are two we, we use very specific terminology.
Um, a ballot box is where you put your ballot in, and the carton
is, is is where they're stored.
Um, it sounds silly, but it's just,
it keeps terminology right?
Yeah.
Um, but anyway, what were you gonna say?
so you went and observed, right?
You
went one year, right?
And
that,
that, by the way, that's another thing that, that's amazing to me is that this
thing is, is a hundred percent open.
You can watch any part of the process.
I had a voter in the last election who was very distrustful.
Distrustful, is that the right word?
Just she was not trusting the ballot, the, the election process.
And I said, you know, you can watch it, you can come tonight, you know, at
five o'clock when we close the poll, you can come and you can watch The
way we tally the, the, the ballots.
We don't tally the votes, but we tally the ballots to
make sure that the numbers match up and everything.
And then we, the paperwork and the chain of custody log and all that stuff.
And, and then how two people will take it to dart.
You can watch that entire process.
You can then go to the ROV and you can watch them count the ballots.
You can watch them do the mail-in ballots.
You can watch 'em do the signature verification, right.
Um, and yeah, so the, it's a hundred percent open process.
Okay.
Yeah, so what I was describing up to this point is the in-person voting process.
At the same time, the majority of voters aren't participating
in that process at all.
Right?
So the majority of voters in California, I don't know what the actual
percentage is, but I know it's the vast majority, uh, every in, in California.
And, and I'm guessing they're gonna continue this.
Every registered voter in California is sent a mail ballot.
And this is where a lot of accusations have happened.
And so, you know, we should talk about that process.
People move in and people move out
and, and people get mail.
They get mail-in ballots for registered voters that no longer live in a location.
So could they just turn those in?
Short answer.
Sure.
Or mail gets stolen all the time these
Mail gets stolen.
Could they steal that ballot?
That, that, that mail-in envelope, by the way, I'm looking over right now.
Hang on, hang on one second.
Welcome to the Preston household.
Here are all the mail-in ballots.
Mail ballot in my house.
Okay.
Um, these are, these are all family members of mine.
Okay.
Could I take every one of these ballots and then fill them out for the candidate
and measures that I like, and then sign their name and send them in?
Yes, I absolutely could.
I would be committing a felony, number one.
Number two, the, the challenge is on the backend signature verification
because every single one of these ballots, uh, actually let me
just, I shall open my ballots.
So, you know, it comes in a, it's funny, I never even thought about doing
this, but here's my mail-in ballot,
did you cover
your address?
It's got my address.
Yes.
Did you
cover it from the YouTube video?
uh, yeah, we'll see.
We'll see how that goes.
And then in this ballot, um, so I get a, I get a, uh, you know, instructions on what
to do, and I get a, I voted sticker here,
Woo hoo.
And this is when I was talking about old school ballot.
This is what I was talking about, right?
This is the old school ballot, right?
And this has, um, you know, obviously the presidential stuff as well as the
local measures for my, um, you know, I got prop, prop five, prop four,
prop three, and then I have this, this is the key to this whole thing.
Yep.
So on this ballot, I'll cover up some personal information on this ballot here,
right is some numbers and a barcode.
Right.
All of that.
And it means that it's gibberish to me, but that barcode and
those numbers are assigned to me,
to this, this ballot, and me as a voter when I send in this ballot.
Um, so, so a couple things.
One is you, so every bo every ballot that is sent to a voter is tracked.
And, if I fill out this mail-in ballot, and I put it in this mail-in
envelope, when it gets sent on the other side, one of the things is that
I have to sign it here and date it.
Right?
Yep.
And then on the backend, there is a team of highly specialized people
that I got to watch in detail.
Whose job it is to verify these signatures.
And they verify them against the signatures that they have on
file with the DMV and the ROV.
Hmm.
And they have a, a series of teams.
One is a computer check, and, uh, you know, if it's like perfectly matched
and then a computer could pass it.
And then if it's not perfect, then it's actually a very small percentage
that could pass through that.
And then if it's not perfect, you have a, a series of teams of people
who are more specialized and more
experienced that they just pa they're like, I can't, I can't verify this.
Right?
Some are like really obvious.
They just, they printed
it instead of signing it.
And it's very, it's obvious, but sometimes, and then at the very top of
it, someone can reject a mail-in ballot.
And when that happens, the voter that this ballot is, is, uh, you
know, from, is sent a curing letter
Yeah,
I was gonna say, it's like special, right?
It's not like, Hey, I'm just rejecting you Don't get to participate
in the election at all.
It's just we can't accept your current ballot.
We will let you then.
Then there's this
Let you fix it.
Yeah.
And they'll, they'll send you a, they'll send you a, a letter to say,
you know, if, if this was your ballot, uh, and you intended it to be your
ballot, you can sign this letter and you can either mail it to us or you
can drop it off at a vote center.
But the thing, really important thing to understand is that all of
this stuff, it's all gotta work.
It's all gotta match this idea that someone would magically pro, pro, uh,
produce a bunch of fake things of these, these are all in a computer somewhere.
Right.
Um, so that you can't just produce a bunch of ballots and a bunch of mail-in
envelopes and then send them in and then have signatures also on file.
Right.
You following
Yeah.
No, that's what I was just gonna think, because going back to my scenario
that someone steals your mail, steals all the ballots in your neighborhood,
Right.
right.
And they just put all the votes they want.
The signatures matching, I think is the hard part.
Yeah,
like there's, there's entire fields of of signature matching.
Right.
I thought about a malicious way to do that, though.
Maybe I shouldn't mention it.
Go ahead, go ahead.
So what you do is you pretend to be someone collecting
signatures for some proposition or some measure to gain support.
You walk the neighborhood, you collect all the signatures.
Now you have the signatures of all the people.
You steal all their ballots, and now you duplicate or copy
their signatures onto the ballot.
Yeah, that is a significant effort.
Um, number two, I would say the, the possibility of you successfully producing
all of their signatures is quite
low.
Right.
And
stealing all those ballots without
Not to mention sealing all the ballots, not to mention how many felonies
you've been producing along the way.
And by the way, this is, I, I'll just throw out one of my favorite sort of, has
nothing to do with the process, but one of my favorite reasons why I don't think
that any, uh, you know, there's already been hundreds of investigations and they
never found enough, you know, significant voter fraud that would've ever overturned,
uh, any, you know, uh, election.
But, but here, here's the Curtis Preston way of thinking.
Um, have you ever tried to throw a, um, uh, a surprise birthday party?
Yes.
Have, do you know how hard it is to throw a surprise birthday party
to get 10 people
to
say anything.
not say
Curtis, just look at you.
You could barely keep the secret about your floors from your wife.
yeah, so it, it's a little silly, but.
In order to throw an election like this, you need thousands of people to agree to
commit multiple felonies, to throw your election, um, and then not talk about it.
Yeah.
Right?
Not ever get a twinge of guilt and then turn you all in.
Um, and there was one, um, there was one story, and again, this came out in,
in talking to my, there is one story of one election in North Carolina in
2018 where, um, some, it happened to be Republicans that were, um, that were
busted doing some mail-in voter fraud.
Now, having said that, most of it was just them violating, I, I know this
is gonna sound weird when I say it.
At first, all they did.
For the most part was violate the laws on how ballots of
mail-in ballots can be collected.
Right.
Uh,
Oh, they were collecting it from people.
They were collecting from people and then, and depositing them and, and I'm
assuming that they would just collect them from people that they knew how they would
vote.
Right.
The North Carolina law requires two witnesses,
and so they were faking the two witnesses and
things.
Now there were some, apparently there was some evidence that
they also changed some votes.
Um, and, and I, I, you know, that obviously all of this is wrong,
uh, it did get discovered and they actually, uh, redid the election.
Uh, but that's the only one.
But what's interesting is it kind of proves my point that when you do something
big enough to throw an election, you, you
You're gonna talk about it?
Yep.
Yeah.
Um, but anyway, the, the, the, I think.
That given the process, the mail-in ballot method is the most
secure way that I can cast a vote.
Right?
I can ensure that my, you know, the, the, I can either turn it
in physically or I can mail it.
And, um, the, the US mail system is also a, you know, an, an amazing thing.
Right?
Is it perfect?
No.
But, uh, a mail carrier friend of mine said once, you know, you do few
things in life with the certainty
that you, do when you, uh, with placing a first class envelope
in the, in the mail system.
And I'm like,
that's kind of true.
Yeah.
And you'll get notified when your ballot is received.
You'll get notified when your ballot is, is counted.
And, uh, and so if if that doesn't happen, you could, you
could do something about it.
Right.
And the thing is that every single step of the process has
all of these checks and balances.
Also the people who, what do they call 'em?
The election observers, right?
Yes.
So you are at any point.
We had an observer today in training.
By the way.
That was the first that I've seen.
Um, we had an observer who sat there and watched an entire day of training.
And, uh, he was very interested and you can do that.
You can go and watch, you can observe.
There are two different types of, of, of observers.
There are observers that are just observing the integrity of the process.
There, there are also observers that are watching after a particular measure
they're trying to get.
So remember how I said people don't know how you vote?
But they know that you did vote.
You can at any time go up and find out.
You can go to a polling place and you can find out who in
this neighborhood has voted.
And you can, you can, if you're a registered Republican
or a Democrat, you can
say what Republicans have voted, what Democrats have voted.
And you can literally then go knock on the doors and say, Hey man,
you, you know, you gotta come vote.
Actually, I just wanna go back to something you said earlier.
This idea what, and I, and I know I kind of said it already, but
this idea of like, why are we, why are we so antiquated with paper?
Right?
That seems antiquated, right?
And I see people that don't know what they're talking about, or at least they've
never talked to anybody that, that knows anything about the election system.
Why is it that we're doing this with this, this antiquated, you
know, we can put people on Mars.
Well, not yet, right?
We can put
catch a rocket
we can catch a rocket, we can have a rocket land and reuse
and all that kind of stuff.
We gotta have a car that drives itself, but we've gotta use paper to vote.
What is wrong with that?
Right?
I, I get that concept.
Um, the, and the reason is that it can be audited.
You can, at any time, you could go back if you wanted to, you could go back and
re-litigate Gore versus Bush, right?
By the way, many groups have, and every time that, that election was so close.
That many groups have done it, and every time they do it,
they get a different result.
Right?
Because they're doing a manual count, they're not doing a computer count.
And there is the, the idea of the hanging Chad.
Right.
And by the way, just as long as we're talking about, and this is
computer people, Chad is plural.
Okay.
It's like confetti.
Chad is the stuff left on the floor after creating a punch card.
There is no such thing as a Chad.
Anyway, sorry, I digress.
Um, the problem with that ballot, that was the butterfly ballot.
Do you
yep, yep, yep, yep.
Yeah.
There were people, I am convinced to this day that there were people
that thought they were voting for one person and they actually ended
up voting for a different person.
But, you know, we gotta
a pass.
Exactly.
That's the past.
Um, and which is why we don't, we don't, we don't use those style of ballots.
Um, those got thrown away a long time ago.
So this is why paper's important at any time, if there's a question,
if there if, if some people that run stats go, this is really weird.
Why, why do the numbers look this way in North County San Diego?
Right?
Let's look at every carton
Because try to
stuff the ballot
from, from Curtis's Vote Center, right?
And, um, they can look at those at every time.
They can also then do fingerprint analysis on
the pieces of paper that went through all the machines, right?
Um, they can do, they can do all, all of these things.
They can do that at any point.
And those ballots get kept in that carton for a certain period of time.
And they can do that, you know, as long as they need to do that.
Right?
Um, oh, I, I know where I was gonna go to go back to something that I said earlier.
One of the problems.
That that people have today is that we don't get the results
on election night the way
we used to.
That is the only kind of downside to a significant amount of mail-in voting.
Um, because processing these mail-in votes looking, those
signatures takes a lot longer
than the mail, than the in-person voting.
while we have increased the number of mail-in pallets, we've always had them for
like service spend who are abroad right.
And right to make
sure they don't get disenfranchised because they
don't
have the ability to show up out of a voting center.
We've always had them and different states had different laws.
California was one of the ones where you could, you could get a mail-in
ballot if you just wanted one.
Some states are very specific on the, who can get mail-in ballots,
you know, you need to be unable to make a polling place or whatever.
Um, and I, I just want to just speak to, I, I can't think of any issue that I
have with the integrity of that system.
Right.
Um, and the, um, the fact that all of the signatures are counted, the fact
that, um, you know, and, and the, and those ballots are, are stored.
Um, but it does have this downside.
And by the way, I'll just speak to Pennsylvania in a minute.
One of the one, one of the states that people bring up all the time is that
Pennsylvania, it takes so long, right?
Well, the reason Pennsylvania takes so long is they have.
Unlike many states, they have a law that says you can't touch
the ballots until election day.
Yep.
And so we've gone to a process whereby the ballots take a lot longer to process.
And you still have this law from many years ago that says you can't
touch the ballots until election day.
And as a result, they, you know, they take a significant
sit there.
Yeah.
And then back in 2020 there were, you know, there were, there, there was
a big thing about how they're like, gee, because of covid we got so many
mail-in ballots, and because of that, it's gonna pass a deadline that we
set for counting the ballots.
And so it went to the courts and the state Supreme Court
said, listen, it's Covid man.
Yes, we, we've had this massive increase of mail-in ballots.
Basically when I look at it, their choices were, should we.
Stop the process because there's a law that says, you know, we have to
count by three days or should we count all the ballots?
And
the state Supreme Court said, we count all the ballots.
because otherwise you're
how you would've done anything different.
Right.
And so, you know, I just saw, I just saw a congressman today on, on the
news referring to that and saying, you know, we'll see that, you know,
they've gotta follow their laws.
They followed their laws, right?
They, they went to the state Supreme Court to see what we should do.
And um, the state Supreme Court said, yeah, we should count the votes.
Right.
Um, and um, and I understand that, that we missed the old days when we
knew the results on election night.
But it doesn't, what's really important about this, it doesn't
mean it has less integrity.
Yep.
It just takes longer
because we're doing it in a different way.
yeah, and I think it's also important to note that it's not just mail-in
ballots which have integrity, right?
It's also if you show up in person and do
your voting Right.
everything in the process has all
these checks and balances and has been fully thought through to make sure
that your vote counts and there is no fraud.
And one of the, one of the things that, um, well, let me
speak to that for a second.
There's fraud.
Okay.
There is absolutely fraud.
I am sure that there is a person here and a person there that goes in
and pretends to be someone else and votes for their, their wife who can't
make it on election day or whatever.
Right.
Or
votes for their girlfriend or whatever.
Um, but, but, but in all the investigations that they found,
they haven't found enough fraud that would, that would,
change an election.
Right.
Here's my thing that I want to just, the, the, the thing that I always say
to anybody who's concerned about the integrity of their election system.
Go ask questions
Go ask questions.
Do one of two things.
Go ask, go to your ROV and ask all the questions you want.
Go to your local vote center.
Ask all the questions you want
or volunteer.
Right now, I don't know how it is in other states, but in California because the,
the vote system got, so we do multi-day
voting in California.
I'm gonna be running an 11 day
vote center, right?
By the way, the way it's gonna work is over 10 days, we're
gonna get about 200 votes.
And on the 11th day, we're gonna get another 200 votes,
Yep.
right?
Um, IL's not a big place.
Um, and most people are voting in mail-in ballots,
but, um.
I had a point with that.
What was I saying?
That if you
yes.
My, oh, my point is, because it's such a big process in California,
it's a paid volunteer position, right?
You get paid to go to training, you get paid while you're in as a poll worker.
It's not, it's not the kind of volunteer position where you
have to give a, a ton of time,
Yeah.
And you get
to learn about the system.
and you get to learn about the system.
You get to
ask all the questions you want
in poll worker training.
Well,
and this is one of the things, it's like with voting, right?
Most processes that exist, it's kind of in secret, right?
Like, like, uh, right.
And with voting though, it's the exact opposite, right?
Everything is open.
You're allowed by law, you're allowed to see any part of the voting process,
and you're allowed to question any part of the voting process.
You know, go into your vote center and say, I've heard this or that.
Right?
By the
way, one of my biggest jobs as a site manager is to answer
those types of questions,
right?
Do you remember Sharpie Gate?
Use an example.
Sharpie Gate.
The, the idea was if you were, if you were, you know, um, Republican,
you would go to vote and then people would, uh, hand you a Sharpie instead
of an official ballot marking pin.
It would cause your, the, the vote to bleed through to the other side.
It would invalidate your ballot, right?
Because, you know, when you look at these ballots, you know, there,
there's, here, here's the ballot.
I'll just talk about this.
So here's the ballot, right?
And so if I, if I write my ballot over here and I, and, and my,
my thing bleeds through, it's gonna show up on the other side.
But guess what?
The things don't line up.
Bullets, the, the bubbles don't line up.
And so even if that happened, it wouldn't invalidate a ballot.
That's
never been the case.
So Sharpie gate wasn't a thing,
Now,
now the one
So ask those questions, right.
And get answers.
but I think though, the one thing people should know though is right.
I know you've told me this, when you are in a voting center,
right, you cannot wear clothing or ATI that represents a political party.
You actually, you, you can represent a political party.
You cannot represent a candidate.
sorry.
A candidate.
Yeah.
Um, you can put, you can put, you know, whatever.
Vote red, vote blue,
you can put that right.
Vote Republican, vote Democrat, um, you know, vote 'em all out.
You
can put, you can put that in there.
Right.
Um, the, um,
uh, vote.
None of the above.
What, and what you cannot do is have the name of a candidate or a measure,
right.
Uh, vote no on Prop
37.
You can't have that.
That's called electioneering.
and then the other thing also is don't be belligerent when you go into these, right?
Don't be mean.
Because they're all volunteers.
They all want the process to work.
They,
you'll find people like Curtis who wanna answer your questions, but
go with an open mind and be kind.
Yeah.
Be kind.
Rewind.
Um, there's an old, there's an old phrase.
Yeah.
Um, so I, I, I do believe strongly in the, in the, in the American voting process.
And I, I, and because I believe strongly in it, I investigated all
of these claims and it's like, okay, the thing that you're saying isn't
possible, like Sharpie Gate was, was one
of them.
The thing you're saying isn't possible and that when you, when you hear things
about, you know, all these ballots, um.
You know, being, like, one of the things that people like to talk about is they
call it ballot harvesting, which is
one person turning in another person's ballot and one person turning in
hundreds of other people's ballots,
right?
Um, and the thing is, because, and, and again, different states have different
laws, but in California, we don't care who drops off your ballot, we're gonna verify
the signature that it, that it matches.
Right?
Um, and, uh, so in, in California, what is called ballot harvesting
is legal, but again, we don't care,
um, as long as the, the signature gets matched,
but with, if you are submitting someone's ballot on that form or on the envelope,
there is a spot for that person to
sign as well.
yeah.
There, uh, where's my ballot?
Yeah, that goes right here, right here.
If you're the person dropping off somebody else's ballot, you put who, who you are
and your relationship to that person.
All right.
Well, I, I feel strongly I want you to go vote.
Right.
Um, we're gonna put this out.
You've got time.
I don't know.
I will say, I, I will say I like that California offers
same day voter registration.
And I think all states should do that.
I think all states should do early voting.
I think they should do whatever they can to allow people to vote.
And, you know,
However they
the voting day is a, is a, is a is not a national holiday.
It should be.
And by, by the way, you know people, oh my God, you do Same day voter registration.
And by the way, I get people coming up and say, Hey, I hear, you know,
illegal aliens are voting, right?
It's like, okay, you have to be a citizen to vote, right?
And, and yes, you could walk up to our polling place because in
California we don't have voter id.
Right?
Um, and, and I know we could, we could talk about that for 20 minutes.
But, um, but what does happen is someone does have to check that ID and
has to check their citizenship status before that ballot will be counted.
It
goes into a, uh, a conditional voter registration.
It's a specific envelope, and that person's citizenship status and,
you know, identification will be checked before their vote is counted.
Um, and so if you're in a state that you, where you can still register and
you're not registered to vote, do it,
man.
You know, if you don't vote, you don't get to complain.
That's my, uh, that's my thing.
And, um.
Uh, oh, and by the way, by the way, just to, we could talk about this forever.
When you do send in your mail-in ballot, it gets indicated in that system.
And so if you then go after you've done a mail-in ballot, and you go
and try to vote in person, the system will say, Hey, this person's already
voted right?
Or if you vote in person and then you try to send in your mail
ballot, you only get to vote once,
right?
That's a basic concept that is enforced in many, many
different ways.
But, um, well, I hope you guys have, you know, I hope you've
learned something and I, if
I know.
I've learned a
else out of this, if you get nothing else out of this, if you want to have
a better understanding of how the vote system works in your area, volunteer
and, um, make a little money, uh, and learn a ton.
Um, I mean, I know so much more about elections than I did,
um, you know, before say 2016,
Exactly, and I know I have learned a ton about elections from you, Curtis.
So.
we've talked quite a bit.
All right, well that is a wrap.