WAYNE COUNTY, Mich. – Educating voters about our election process is crucial, especially as misinformation and disinformation about the integrity of our elections are on the rise.
The Canton Township Clerk’s Office has their ballots secured, packed, and ready to be shipped out to 33 precincts for Election Day.
“We have recruited our poll workers. We have trained our poll workers. We got all the equipment ready to go,” Canton Township Clerk Michael Siegrist said.
The equipment includes tabulators that voters will insert their ballots.
The tabulator will read the ballot like a scantron and store the results on two cards.
“Card number one and card number two both have results,” Siegrist said. “Again, we have that belts and suspenders security feature in our election system where we like to keep results at different locations on different devices.”
After the polls close Tuesday (Nov. 5) night, card number one from each of the tabulators will be uploaded onto a computer at the Clerk’s Office.
The Election Management System is used to aggregate the election results.
“It is an air-gapped machine,” Siegrist said. “It is not on the internet.”
The results in Canton Township will be reported to the Wayne County Clerk’s Office.
Siegrist believes it’s important that voters are informed about how our elections work.
“We have been working really hard to promote both the security of the elections and the transparency of the election system so that people feel confident that their ballot is counted exactly how they cast it,” he said.
Local 4 asked Siegrist about his biggest concern about the day after the election.
“I like high turnout and wide margins,” Siegrist said. “Elections, where you have a wide margin, are elections where the media gets to call the winner early, and individuals can begin to start to process that on their own. Close elections tend to breed lots of concern from individuals.”
With that could come litigation, which was prevalent during the 2020 presidential election.
“That’s something that is challenging for an election administrator,” Siegrist said.