Czy liczmani z Filadelfii zdołają wyprzedzić wyborcze kłamstwa?

The area where it happens has metallic beams and harsh overhead lighting. Paper whizzes through conveyor belts on large gears close tall, human-sized cages with keypad locks.

Though it resembles one, this is not a factory. It’s Philadelphia’s mail-in ballot-counting facility, where somewhere around 200,000 votes are expected to be tallied beginning on Election Day. The longer that tally takes, the more misinformation could seep into a deep well of paranoia and distrust over the democratic process — 1 that overflowed 4 years ago in a violent attack on the US Capitol.

The stakes, you could say, are high.

Pennsylvania’s 19 electoral votes could decide whether erstwhile president Donald Trump or Vice president Kamala Harris wins the 2024 presidential election. Many of the state’s ballots have already been cast through the mail. Yet Pennsylvania’s laws prohibit even beginning to process mail-in ballots until 7AM on Election Day. The consequence can be a serious hold in reporting election results — in 2020, The Associated Press didn’t call Pennsylvania as having been won by Joe Biden until 4 days after Election Day.

The state’s solution is simply a downright industrial ballot-counting process, which elected officials invited reporters to preview (using test ballots for demonstration purposes) in late October. It’s a highly regimented process that takes place in a sprawling warehouse in northeast Philadelphia, filled with the sounds of whirring ballot-sorting machines and the constant rifling of paper. On Election Day, workers will open hundreds of thousands of mailed ballots and feed them into machines that read and number them, keeping a careful eye on monitors flagging any irregularities. The scanned ballots will besides be watched by election observers from each political party. “We do it right,” says Philadelphia City Commissioners chair Omar Sabir, a Democrat.

The city’s press tour is part of a broader effort to educate voters and reassure them that voting is safe, secure, and trustworthy. It’s an attempted bulwark against false claims about ballots being inaccurately tallied, flipped, or destroyed to skew election results.

Lisa Deeley, Democratic vice chair of the Philadelphia City Commissioners, says she doesn’t anticipate as long of a hold as 2020. Mail-in voting was an unusually popular option that year due to the ongoing covid-19 pandemic. But erstwhile conspiracies can ricochet across social media in seconds, all hr counts. “The more people hear things, unfortunately, the more inclined they are to believe them,” she says.

As Deeley explains, election workers are “starting from brick one” on Election Day. That means not just tallying who votes for whom, but reviewing the signatures on sealed envelopes, removing them from their secrecy sleeves, and flattening the ballots themselves. Commissioners have been “begging” for reforms to this process, Deeley says. Absent these changes, they’re left with method and procedural solutions like buying fresh equipment and relying on more experienced election workers — shaving time off the clock any way they can.

“We know that the eyes of the planet are going to be on Philadelphia,” City Commissioner Seth Bluestein, a Republican, told reporters gathered in the warehouse. “We are going to run the safest, most safe election in Philadelphia history.”

The process of tallying ballots — as I and another reporters see, shuffling behind Sabir around the 360,000-square-foot area — starts with what looks like an oversized Xerox machine. It feeds ballots in sealed envelopes into a conveyor belt on 2 gears and spits them out across a long track, sorting them into different slots based on ward and division. The device scans barcodes on the envelopes, each 1 linked to a registered voter’s ID to mark the ballots as “received” so 1 voter can’t send multiple votes. If it was mailed without a signature or not placed in its included secrecy envelope, it’s set aside and added to a list that voters can check, letting them correct the problem with a replacement ballot.

This is as far as workers can get before Election Day, so the sorted envelopes go into safe retention until the morning of November 5th. Then, at the crack of dawn, the number begins. Twenty-two envelope extractors, built around desks where workers will aid separate the envelopes from their contents erstwhile opened, run about 1,000 envelopes each per hour. 4 fast slicing machines open the yellow secrecy envelopes inside those envelopes at a rate of about 10,000 per hour. Workers remove the ballots from the now-opened secrecy envelopes — and since this process is separated from erstwhile the ballots are removed from their outer envelopes, it ensures votes stay anonymous. Now patted flat, the ballots scope the step this full process is building up to: the count.

An election scanner is fundamentally a gigantic Scantron machine, with a stretched-out metallic S-shape that ballots glide through as the device reads the marks voters have made. This warehouse has 8 high-speed scanners, each 1 expected to check about 2,500 ballots per hour. (Four additional slower scanners can read 1,000 per hour.) any ballots can’t be read — if they’ve been marked with a light-colored pen or had mistakes erased with Wite-Out, for instance. A staff of nonpartisan civilian servants review these and mark the voter’s choices onto replacement ballots, which can then be scanned.

Election observers — who are selected by each organization — will watch screens showing the ballots to aid guarantee everything is adjudicated fairly. Finally, the processed ballots go into another locked retention area. They will yet be kept in long-term retention for the 22 months mandated by law — just in case they’re needed for a recount.

As this number is taking place, an opposing process will be spinning up: a disinformation apparatus that aims to convince voters the election is being rigged.

In 2020, this process coalesced into the “Stop the Steal” election denial movement, culminating in an effort to overturn the election of president Joe Biden by force. In 2024, it’s already gotten started. A group of Republicans including home Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA), who voted to sustain objections to the 2020 election results, sued Pennsylvania’s state government, demanding military and overseas ballots be set aside due to what election experts call unfounded doubts about the process. (It was besides late tossed by a judge.) Election deniers have gained seats on crucial state and local bodies that could give them leverage over election certification. And online, Trump mega-donor Elon Musk has set up an X community for reporting “voter fraud and irregularities,” which has already filled up with unfounded claims.

For Philadelphia’s City Commissioners, misinformation is personal. Sabir smiles as he relates 1 of the “craziest” conspiracy theories: a blog post that claimed he was personally taking ballots to a mobster in Atlantic City, fresh Jersey, to be destroyed. (It’s not clear why the mobster needs them trucked out more than 60 miles just to be shredded.) “We’re not doing crazy stuff. We’re just trying to come to do our occupation for the American people,” Sabir says.

The threats aren’t always amusing. Bluestein told The Verge that, while ballots were being counted in 2020, he received antisemitic threats. The harassment got so bad that Bluestein had police protection at his home the week of the election.

So far, “the heat is down” in 2024, he says. But election officials around the country are inactive on advanced alert. In Maricopa region in Arizona, another swing state, an authoritative late said safety will be available to escort election workers to their cars. The state is besides preparing for cutting-edge risks like infiltration by artificial intelligence scams, a script the staff roleplayed last year.

Bluestein himself is trying to place and call out false information online. In 1 case, he debunked an allegation — shared on X by Musk — that a nonprofit offering services to low-income and houseless individuals harvested thousands of mail-in ballots from 1 address. (Bluestein says “fewer than 150 ballots” were mailed there in 2020.)

His active function online is partially due to the fact that he feels that social media platforms “are not doing as good a occupation as they did in 2020” with combating misinformation. 4 years ago, platforms were on advanced alert for false claims, even if they frequently failed to enforce their policies effectively. In 2024, the situation is different. Under force from Trump and his allies to take a more hands-off function erstwhile it comes to election misinformation, many tech companies have relaxed the policies they had in place last time around. Meta and YouTube both rolled back rules against false claims that the 2020 election was stolen, and both Meta and X have made it more hard for researchers on their platforms to access data utilized to monitor emerging threats.

At the same time, both Bluestein and Sabir say they haven’t yet seen the same level of targeted harassment and threats. Bluestein says broader misinformation claims are circulating, but he hasn’t found as many claims that single out circumstantial officials or rank-and-file workers. Despite harassment in 2020, he says Philadelphia had no problem recruiting poll workers or staffers at the warehouse. “I think everyone understands the importance of this work, and they realize that while there could be risks associated with it, they’re all signing up to do the job.”

Misinformation frequently picks at tensions that already exist. Black Americans, for example, are already a group commonly targeted by disenfranchisement efforts, which Sabir says results in “misconceptions about ‘my vote doesn’t count.’” Add disinformation to that, and Sabir says it drives a notion through this community of “What am I doing? Why am I wasting my time?”

Bluestein has found that he can persuade voters through one-on-one conversations. But during that time, false claims can scope millions of voters online. “When you scale that up to build trust, it’s a lot harder,” Bluestein says. “But erstwhile you truly tell people the facts and show them, they will have more faith.”

While election officials effort to persuade skeptics, election deniers have increased their attacks against the administration of the voting process itself. In 2020, election deniers “used violent rhetoric as the means to suppress the vote and make it harder for folks to vote, or make the voting process seem scary and intimidating,” says Deborah Hinchey, Pennsylvania state manager for the nonpartisan nonprofit All Voting is Local. This year, she is seeing election deniers usage “administrative tactics to do the same thing — to suppress the vote, to make it seem an intimidating and overwhelming process, and to make folks feel like their vote may not be counted.”

But Hinchey says those efforts will fail. In 2020, Trump lawyers and another allies brought many cases to change the election results after the fact. Those suits invariably fizzled, and any of the lawyers who filed them have been sanctioned or disbarred. “The analysis now seems to be, ‘Well, then let’s go straight for the votes themselves, and discredit certain kinds of voters and make it seem like certain people are voting that are not, so that we can then attack all votes.’”

So far, these attempts mostly haven’t panned out. While right-wing activists throughout Pennsylvania have sought to challenge voter registrations, they’ve proven unsuccessful or identified inactive voters election officials already knew about.

As for trust, a September Spotlight PA poll by MassINC Polling Group found that 63 percent of respondents were very or somewhat assured that votes in the presidential race would be counted accurately and reasonably nationally. But voters had far more assurance in how elections in their own counties would be administered — 78 percent expressed assurance in the results.

Organizers are seeing more people wanting to get active in the process of democracy, and that participation can aid quell election fears, says Susan Gobreski, president of the League of Women Voters of Philadelphia. While proceeding about election skeptics getting active in the process might rise any red flags, Gobreski says it’s crucial to remember that “most people are actually acting in good faith.”

Arming the public and the press with trustworthy information is simply a smart move, says Hinchey. “You can’t dispel all bad information with good information, but you can make certain that organizations and the press have a truly good knowing of how elections are actually functioning in Pennsylvania,” she says. Gobreski encourages voters to ask questions but besides to “be prepared to perceive to the answers.”

Ultimately, Hinchey adds, most voters are just looking for reliable information. “The average Pennsylvania voter is looking for the facts of the situation, and may take in the falseness, but erstwhile presented with facts, is going to accept that as reality.”

There’s 1 final option on the table for ballot tallies: a hand count. It’s common to audit samples of ballots by hand and compare them to device results, confirming the machines are working properly. (Election officials besides do preelection investigating of equipment to make certain they’re decently calibrated, frequently on livestreams.) But in states like Georgia, election skeptics have — so far, unsuccessfully — pushed for full hand counts of all ballot. That’s a recipe for mistakes and delays.

Hand-counting has an crucial function in auditing elections, says Pennsylvania Secretary of the Commonwealth Al Schmidt, a Republican. “But if you’re just counting by hand, you don’t have anything to compare it against. So erstwhile people do crucial numbers of hand counting, that’s where you see more errors.” Compared to device counts, it’s besides a glacial process. “If people are unhappy with how long they wait now, imagine how long” it would take without the machinery to get results, says Deeley. “It’s [like] going to Nabisco and having them make all the cookies by scratch.”

On Election Day, the machines in Philadelphia’s warehouse will flip on, rifling through thousands and thousands of envelopes, slicing and scanning. Signatures will be checked and folded. Paper will be flattened. The work of democracy will run through machines and careful human hands. It’s a tedious process, but it’s besides 1 that’s at the very heart of the American experiment. Each ballot counted is 1 step closer to determining if Pennsylvania will be colored in red or blue on tv screens across the country — and possibly determining the next president. And although all minute after polls close is another minute for spreading uncertainty in America’s electoral system, Philadelphia’s officials are resolute.

“Philadelphia is the birthplace of democracy,” says Sabir. “I’ll be damned if democracy dies here.”