GPS tracking and public tours: The extreme measures the US is taking to prove elections are safe

Four years after Donald Trump and his loyalists repeated groundless claims of election fraud, counties across the United States are working to ensure 2024 won’t be a repeat of 2020 by taking extreme measures to demonstrate that US elections are not “rigged”.

His allegations about how the 2020 election was “stolen” spread on social media, resulting in baseless theories circulating, and which left much of the public with residual distrust of the vote-counting process. Those fears haven’t subsided since 2020 and Trump continues to push the idea that the voting process in 2024 will be flawed.

Officials across the country are now trying to restore voters’ trust by promoting transparency. Some of those measures include GPS trackers on machines, offering public tours, providing 24/7 video surveillance and educating voters.

“The best way to create trust in our election system is to make it as transparent as possible and ensure the public is involved in supporting that process,” Colorado’s Mesa County recorder Bobbie Gross told The Independent.

The pro-Trump district in Colorado is working particularly hard to restore voters’ trust after one of the county’s former clerks, Tina Peters, was charged in August with seven counts related to a security breach during the 2020 election.

The “secure rooms,” where the county’s election equipment lives, are now only accessible with a badge, and even then, workers have to enter in pairs “for accountability”, Ms Gross said. The county keeps 24/7 camera surveillance on this equipment, including ballot boxes, to ensure security – even when there’s not an election going on. If anyone requests video footage, the county will provide it, Ms Gross said.

The county also holds open houses, including one planned for election day, allowing the public to witness the process, inspect the equipment and ask questions, Ms Gross said. Providing the public tours is important, she added, because “there’s a lot of things that I think the public is not aware of – how an election was conducted and what our checks and balances are – so we really try to make sure that we can get that out to the public”.

Perhaps no county was as heavily scrutinised after the 2020 election as Maricopa County, Arizona. Mr Trump won the district in 2016, but famously lost it in 2020, making it the perfect scapegoat for his “rigged” election claims.

Maricopa County, home to 62 per cent of people who live in Arizona, has become a crucial battleground that can help decide presidential elections.

The county also offers tours of its election area to the public. Before the nearly two-hour tour, individuals are asked to take a survey, rating their confidence in the election system on a scale of one to 10.

“We ask them to bring your greatest election fears, bring your greatest election conspiracies: we will address them all,” Taylor Kinnerup, the Maricopa County Recorder’s Office communications director, told The Independent. At the end of the tour, they retake the survey, and people usually give a significantly higher rating.

If going in person isn’t an option, Maricopa County also has a “transparency” tab on its website, offering a virtual tour of the facility.

In Pinal County, Arizona, a historically pro-Trump district southeast of Phoenix, officials took the mission to be more transparent quite literally.

A wall of windows, dubbed the “fishbowl”, allows onlookers a 360-degree view to easily watch ballots being counted and is part of a new $32m election centre. The 53,000 sq ft centre was constructed in just 16 months to be ready before the July primary election.

“When you know in your soul there is nothing to hide, being open about the process is a no-brainer,” Pinal County recorder Dana Lewis told The Washington Post. “Even when you pull the curtain back, there are still people who lurk in the shadows, but we are going to continue to try with logic, accuracy and reason to combat the narrative of distrust in the elections process.”

In addition to giving the public more access to their election facilities, counties have implemented measures that appear to put an end to baseless election fraud theories that Trump and his supporters pushed.

Trump’s claimed that “mules” drop off hundreds of fake ballots at drop boxes. Now Pinal County and Maricopa County have installed video cameras to monitor the boxes.

Social media claims of a “suspicious bus” carrying voting machines spread. But Pinal County has put GPS trackers on the cages that transport election devices, the Post reported. Since election officials know the routes they are supposed to be travelling on, “if all the sudden they stop moving … we know there’s an issue,” Ms Lewis said.

To demonstrate its equipment is not connected to the internet (and therefore cannot be hacked) the wires in Maricopa County’s tabulation centre are exposed. “We also have port blockers on all of our machines so [nobody can] put in a stray USB drive and either pull something out or put something in,” Ms Kinnerup said.

Mr Trump also promoted a debunked claim that people were “stuffing ballot boxes” with fake ballots. But printing off fake ballots that result in votes is just not possible, Ms Gross said. Each envelope boasts a signature, which goes through a verification process, and each envelope also contains the individual’s voter ID, giving the person “voter credit”. At the end of the election, Mr Gross said three components have to match: “I have to have the same amount of voter credit as I do envelopes to ballots tabulated.”

If a ballot is flagged as suspicious, the ballot is not counted, but referred to the district attorney for review.

“I would never tell anybody that fraud doesn’t happen in the election, because we typically see fraud in every election. Is it to the point that would change the outcome of an election? No, I have not seen it on that scale,” Ms Gross said.

Mesa County, Arizona, is working on another project to ensure more trust. Voters may soon be able to hand-count the ballots at home – digitally. Once any personal information is redacted, the image of the ballot can be posted online, showing how it was marked and read.

While trying to bolster voters’ trust that elections are fair and safe, counties have also enhanced measures to ensure election workers are safe.

“I think the more seeds of doubt that are sowed in public sentiment, the greater the risk is to the safety of those who are performing the work,” Ms Kinnerup said.

Since the rhetoric that swirled during the 2020 election, threats against election workers have mounted. Four secretaries of state have received death threats since 2020 while a recent Brennan Center for Justice survey showed that 38 percent of local election officials experienced threats, harassment or abuse for doing their jobs.

The threats have been so severe that Cobb County, a swing district in Georgia, is considering introducing panic buttons; Mesa County will employ security at its central counting facility on election day; Maricopa County has installed a “black iron fence” surrounding the building, requiring badge access for entry.

In 2023, envelopes containing fentanyl and other substances were sent to election offices across the country. Now, Ms Gross said Mesa County is offering personal protective equipment for those opening ballot envelopes.

Given these new measures, counties seem hopeful that they will have debunked any conspiracy theories before they crop up.

“Going into this election, we’re going to be more on offence rather than defence,” Ms Kinnerup said. “In 2020, we had never been faced with this level of questions. We had never experienced this amount... this amount of distrust. And I think now that we’ve spent the past four years kind of preparing for that.”