MICHIGAN, USA — Ottawa County Clerk Justin Roebuck wants to assure voters that their ballots and information are safe and secure. He spent the day checking their voting equipment in preparation for this November's election.
He says alleged election fraud incidents like the one in Kent County shows that while there may be bad actors out there, there are checks and balances in the voting process to catch them.
James Holkeboer, an election worker during this summer's primary, is charged with two election fraud felonies. He's accused of putting a personal flash drive into the election poll book at the Ada Bible Church polling location in Gaines Township.
"We can think of the electronic poll book like the guest list," Roebuck says. "That is the registration list of all of the voters in your precinct."
The device stores the names, addresses and birth dates of those who voted that day. The personal information of about 2,500 voters in Gaines Township could be at risk.
"For someone else to plug another flash drive into the laptop, they would not be able to retrieve the same data that is on the poll book, because the poll book is theoretically stored on that encrypted flash drive," Roebuck says. "However, they obviously would have access to the data that is in front of them, which is the voters' private information. And so that is certainly a risk and certainly a risk that we would want to mitigate."
He says poll workers are the backbone of election day, so it frustrated him to hear about the alleged incident. Poll workers are paid volunteers who live in the community they serve, and they take an oath to uphold the Constitution and law in Michigan while carrying out their responsibilities.
"It's frustrating to see people take a position like that and abuse it," Roebuck says. "But again, I think, you know, the other piece of that is just reassured confidence in the process that these kinds of things don't go unnoticed."
It's important to note that the electronic poll book does not get connected to the ballot tabulator or the internet, so the Kent County Clerk says the primary election was not impacted.
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