Benton voters mystified by ‘ballot sleeves’

About 93,000 voters in Benton County are in for a surprise as ballots for the Feb. 9 special election hit mailboxes.

The county mailed ballots last week for the school levy elections held by the Richland, Kennewick, Kiona-Benton City, Paterson and Finley school districts.

It’s not the funding requests that come as a surprise, but the ballots themselves. With the latest election, Benton joins a growing list of counties to abandon sealable secrecy envelopes in favor of open-ended sleeves.

It sounds like a minor distinction, but the sleeve is giving some voters pause.

Ron Kimball, 74, said it’s a stretch to say a sleeve that’s open on two sides and doesn’t fully shield the ballot guarantees privacy.

“I think there’s some logic missing,” the Richland retiree said. “I think it’s just a horrible waste of money.”

Amanda Garcia, elections administrator for Benton County, expects the sleeve to save a step. Workers won’t have to slice open the secrecy envelope on busy election nights.

“For processing on our end, it seems like it will speed things up,” she said.

Garcia said the sleeve offers the same privacy as a full-fledged envelope.

Franklin County adopted ballot sleeves without issue in 2012, said Diana Killian, the county’s elections administrator. Voters were familiar with sleeves because the county used them before it converted to scannable ballots more than 10 years ago.

Sleeves are cheaper to buy, can be reused and save a step on election night. That means less harried workers and faster results.

“We’ve had a lot of success with them,” she said. Franklin County mailed 30,000 ballots for school levy elections in Pasco, North Franklin and Kahlotus on Tuesday.

In Washington’s vote-by-mail system, voters fill out their ballot, insert it into a security envelope, then insert the security envelope into a mailing envelope. The outer envelope has a bar code and signature line that could make the voter identifiable if there wasn’t a way to separate the ballot from the envelope.

The security envelope is meant to provide that measure of secrecy when the first envelope is opened and discarded.

As ballots arrive, elections workers scan the bar code to log the ballot into the system. Once they’ve verified the signature matches the one on file, they open the outer envelope.

The unmarked security envelope with the completed, anonymous ballot is removed and set aside for processing.

“Once they’re separated, you can’t identify the ballot,” Garcia said.

K&H Elections Services, a division of Everett-based K&H Integrated Print Solutions, supplies Benton County with its ballot envelopes and instigated the change, Garcia said.

The company has a long history of printing elections materials, including ballots and envelopes.

The Washington Secretary of State’s office acknowledged sleeves as a legitimate security measure in a 2013 publication offering guidance to counties on how to ensure privacy in elections.

This story was originally published January 23, 2016 at 2:57 PM with the headline "Benton voters mystified by ‘ballot sleeves’."