Thu. Mar 28th, 2024

From today’s Idaho Capital Sun:

Ballot drop boxes are so secure they’ve survived getting hit by an SUV and rolled by a school bus — yet much of the battle over voting rights has centered on the big metal boxes.

In the November 2020 general election, nearly 40 states had ballot drop boxes available and more voters used drop boxes than in any election in U.S. history, according to a report from the Stanford-MIT Healthy Elections Project.   

But in the lead up to the election and the years since, the big metal boxes have become the focus of controversy in state legislatures from Georgia to Texas to Nebraska and in courts in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. In many states, Republican lawmakers want to limit or end voters’ choice to return their ballots to drop boxes, citing the potential for tampering or fraud — though there’s no proof that’s happened.

Larry Olson, the vice president of Laserfab, a Washington state-based metal fabrication company that has manufactured drop boxes since 2010, recognizes the irony of all the attention on metal boxes in 2022.

Olson has traveled to election conferences across the country with county and state election officials. “I always find it funny,” he said. “I’m surrounded by all these people with voting on iPads and all these different ballot tabulations and I’m just sitting there trying to sell a big metal box. It’s the lowest of the lowest tech you can have.”

Olson, whose company has roughly 800 drop boxes in use scattered across the country, said there’s little validity to lawmakers’ security concerns.  

“It’s difficult to say you can 100 percent stop anybody from doing anything, but we have found through history that this is a very secure way to vote,” he said. “I do think a certain portion of that argument is very, shall we say, political in nature.”

Read the complete story here.

By Editor