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 nation are ensuring 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 that 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 them 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,” 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, 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, Gross said. Providing the public tours is important, he 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 scrutinized after the 2020 election as Maricopa County, Arizona. Trump won the district in 2016, but infamously lost it in 2020, making it the perfect scapegoat for his “rigged” election claims.
Maricopa County, where most Arizona residents live, 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, when individuals 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 $32 million election center. The 53,000-square-foot center was constructed in just 16 months to be ready before the July primary election.
