Senator Sharon Hewitt

The BEC Interview; PART TWO: Election Integrity and Voting Machines

Jan 25, 2023

We offer you this second installment of the interview with gubernatorial candidate Senator Sharon Hewitt, as we discuss elections in Louisiana, the trustworthiness of our voting system, the process of upgrading, and evaluating machine systems.

BEC: Are you very confident, 100% confident, that Louisiana properly counts every vote and we have complete election integrity:

Hewitt: I’m reasonably confident. The person who’s going to know is the Secretary of State, right? And he would be the one to tell you if we’re going to have any problems, but it wouldn’t be in his best interest to do that, right? So… let’s set that aside…
I’ve learned a lot about our election laws and how they’re executed in Louisiana. And I will say, with so many checks and balances, that it’s impressive. When you get way down in the weeds, and you’re in a clerk of court’s office and you’re a fly on the wall, and you’re seeing all the checks and balances and you’re seeing how the ballots are handled and how the elections are handled, it’s kind of impressive! And you say, ‘Oh wow, I didn’t know they did that’ and it does give you a lot more confidence in our elections. Can they be improved? I fundamentally always believe everything can be improved.
What I did after the 2020 elections, and my committee has oversight over election laws…. I served on a national committee with legislative leaders and secretaries of state from all around the country, and we looked at best practices in different states, for different parts of elections…. this state had a great process for managing absentee ballots by mail… that state did a great job on voter registration. We took the election code from those states and mapped it into Louisiana’s election code. I looked at that and asked, ‘Okay, what sort of things are we doing really well, comparable to whatever state was chosen for their best practices in that regard, and there are a lot things where I felt like we are as good or better in different areas of the election law. There were a few areas where I thought we could take some good ideas and implement those.
I worked with half a dozen legislators in Louisiana and we put together a package of bills last year that, in a number of different bills — if we had put them all into one bill, people would have been talking about us like we are a Georgia or Florida. So, we had a bill, for example, for voter ID for absentee ballots, so you’d have to have your ID on a form to request an absentee ballot. And as you know, you can get an absentee ballot in Louisiana for only six or seven different reasons. We killed all the bills in my committee where they wanted to go to universal mail-in balloting. We killed those bills. We killed the bills with ballot drop boxes. We killed all that. We killed bills to expand early voting. We did [early voting] temporarily for covid reasons, but we are back to our normal one week of early voting in Louisiana. So there were a number of things that we killed.
There were a number of things that we passed bills on dealing with more poll watchers, more auditing of results after an election. All of those bills basically ended up being vetoed by the governor. We passed them in the legislature, and the governor vetoed every one of them. The only bill in that package that he did not veto was my bill, where we moved from the electronic klunker machines that we’ve had for thirty years to a paper-based system.
That is what we’ve been working on for the year with the Voting System Commission, to evaluate all the best practices in how to do that. I tried to keep the legislation reasonably broad, as I believe all state law should be… the Constitution even broader, state law broad… and take care of a lot of the details in the administrative procedure act and the policy-making process, which Kyle’s [Kyle Ardoine, Secretary of State] office initiates; it still has to come before a legislative committee for approval or not. So we were going to have more checks and balances regarding the details.
Where we are now in that process - and again this was driven not so much because of the presidential election, or if the election was stolen, or that Dominion machines are awful. It really was about ‘What do we do in Louisiana well, and what do we not do as well, and recognizing that our machines are thirty years old and we can’t get the replacement parts — that’s been recognized for about five years now. There’s been two attempts by the secretary to initiate a process to replace those machines. Now, I’m looking at it, and it is post-2020, and okay, before we keep launching down the same path that [the secretary] has been on, which was to get an updated version of those same kind of machines, let’s look and see what other states are doing. This is a golden opportunity for us to take whatever we believe we’ve learned and apply that.
So what we learned is that thirty-eight other states have a paper-based system. And as you know the only paper we have currently in Louisiana is the absentee paper mail-in ballots. The early voting and the election day voting is just a number on the back of the machine with no opportunity to have any kind of check and balance.
So what a paper-based system does is, it allows you to call the paper “the Vote of Record,” so the paper is the official vote. The tabulator is just tabulating it for efficiency purposes. The paper is saved for 22 months, so you can either do a recount — which recounts every vote cast, because now you can recount election day, you can recount early voting, and can recount absentee ballots. Today, you can only recount absentee ballots; all those other ones, the number is the number and that’s where the majority of the votes are. So with the paper-based system you’ll have paper for all aspects of our voting, however you choose to vote, that can be recounted or can be audited. And we have them all where you have to audit - you spot audit certain precincts as a test to make sure that everything looks copasetic.
I like the direction we’re going and I think that it’s a change for voters. I know there’s still a vocal group out there that wants everything to just be marked with a #2 pencil and counted by hand. I think there’s a balance between enough technology so it’s a more efficient process, people want results on election night! There’s a balance between taking some of the cyber-security concerns off the table by having things a little bit more old school, with the need to have some technologies so that we’re efficient and timely in reporting our results.
That’s where we’re going. The commission has concluded its work for the year, the recommendations gave the secretary of state the option to have hand-marked ballots or to have ballots that are marked by a machine: it’s called a ‘ballot marking device,’ - marked by a machine and verified by the voter that that is their intent, run into a scanner by the voter as you’re casting your ballot. So I think it’s better than our current system by a mile.
I think it’s a balance between completely paper old school processes and one that is more transparent and more auditable than what we currently have.
The only thing the voting commission ruled out is counting votes by hand; everything else, whether it’s marked by a #2 pencil, or marked by a machine where the voter prints a paper and the voter gets to see it — that option is available and we did a big public show and tell, where a lot of the vendors came and they brought their goodies and it’s amazing to me: something that seems so simple and straight-forward, no two of them were alike. There were probably 25 of them there, and no two were alike in terms of how they solve the problem of just counting votes.
In some of them you’d insert a blank sheet of paper and it would generate your ballot and print it for you on a piece of paper. In others of them, it would spit out a whole ballot with your choices marked. Some would just spit out who you chose, not the whole ballot, but who your choices were.
Some of them would print it on a piece of paper and you would view it behind a piece of plexiglass, so you never took possession of it but you got to see it, which some of the election officials really like, because they’re afraid some voters would [get confused] and walk out with this piece of paper like it’s a receipt, when in fact it’s your real vote! And you need to make sure it goes into the scanner and it gets saved for audit purposes. So there’s something to be said for the one where you see it without taking possession of it and then it goes through the scanner.
They all do it differently, and it’s fascinating, and it seems like it would be simple and they’d all be the same. But as I said, there’s kind of three or four main companies, but there were 25 people there with the ability to do it.
It’s a big contract. Louisiana is one of the few states where the decision is made at the state level, and every parish’s machines are exactly the same. In a state like Texas, at the state level, they vet the different machines and come up with an approved list and then the counties all individually choose which machines they want off of the approved list; every county could have a different machine and a different process in Texas. It works for them.
But because everything is done at the state level in Louisiana — it’s been thirty years since we did this the last time, there’s a lot of interest in what we’re doing, by the vendors and certainly by the voters. I’ve been involved in this because of the committee that I chair, but also to me it was an opportunity for us to take what’s an antiquated system that was working pretty well for us and move us into a system that is consistent with what 38 other states are doing, and to have an auditable voting system, which is so important to me. Think of how many elections, it’s sort of surprising, have come down to just a couple of votes. And you can’t recount anything but the absentee by mail votes, and so this is a way, I think, to have a better process.