Trump’s rigged election claim doesn’t register with region’s registrars of voters

The election is rigged, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump claims.

Really? That would be news to the people who run the elections around here and virtually everywhere else in the nation. To rig an election you have to manipulate the equipment in the hands of county registrars of voters across the nation who stake their reputations on running accurate, fair and honest elections.

“So I hired 2,000 people from all walks of life (for Election Day duties),” said Austin Erdman, San Joaquin County’s Registrar of Voters, the sarcasm just dripping. “I have 20 full-timers and 150 part-timers. Yeah, we’re all in on the fix. Sure ... and nobody’s saying a word about it. Not a thing. They’re all keeping quiet.”

In other words, Erdman and others who run elections have real problems with Trump’s spewings. The candidate cites no facts, no specifics, no details. He simply broad-brushes the entire voting system in the United States because it suits his purpose.

Widespread voter fraud, officials wonder? Bring it, they say. Show us your empirical evidence, Donald. So far, only bluster.

The fact a presidential candidate, just a few weeks before the election, would trash what Americans consider their most valuable voice – their vote – disheartens and sickens people like Erdman, Tuolumne County elections supervisor Robert Bergstrom and Secretary of State Alex Padilla. They oversee elections at the local and state levels, respectively, and make the security and sanctity of a citizen’s vote their top priority.

Trump’s accusation is “irresponsible at best and un-American at the worst,” Padilla told me this week. Election results from all 58 counties come to his department. “It is disrespectful not just to the election officials in the counties in California and throughout the country, but also to the workers who staff the polls to assist voters who come to exercise their right to vote.”

And if Padilla could directly confront Trump?

“I’d tell him he’s wrong,” Padilla said. And then tell him why. Because to rig a national election requires gaining access to the voting equipment in enough of the nation’s 3,144 counties and their equivalents to sway the numbers. Hack into thousands upon thousands of pieces of unlinked machinery?

“The equipment used to mark, cast and count a ballot is not connected to the internet,” Padilla said. “That is the benefit of having a decentralized way of voting in this country.”

And even if they were able to tamper with the numbers sent electronically by each county to Padilla in Sacramento, there are double-checks and backups.

Nor is the vote-by-mail system vulnerable, said Bergstrom. Registering to vote in California requires Social Security and California driver’s license or ID confirmation. Whether you vote at a polling place or vote by mail, a signature is required. When you vote by mail, you have to sign the outside of the return envelope and also can have a witness sign to confirm your signature.

Your signature gets checked and double-checked.

“I look at the signatures on all of them,” Bergstrom said, referring to the mail-in ballots. He and his staff compare them with those on file, and while they aren’t FBI handwriting analysts, he said, they have become adept at recognizing signature characteristics that help them determine whether a ballot should be counted or merits further investigation.

They also frequently check the numbers of ballots going to single addresses – where there are multiple family members who vote, or apartment or senior complexes – and match voter registrations against death records to make sure Uncle Jack isn’t voting from the grave.

It doesn’t stop people from trying, but the success rate is negligible. In the June presidential primary, 17,546 Tuolumne County residents voted. Of those who voted by mail, 16 came back with no signatures and 32 more were disallowed because the signatures didn’t match up with what was on file.

Another head-shaker: Many county elections officials list “No Party Preference” as their political affiliation because they don’t want to be aligned with a major party or maligned for being in one, staying out of the partisan frays when close races occur.

Here in the Valley, though, Stanislaus County’s Lee Lundrigan, San Joaquin County’s Erdman and Merced County’s Barbara Levey all are registered Republicans, as are numerous others throughout the state and no doubt the nation. For Trump to claim the election is rigged is to insinuate some members of his own party would be party to fraud that would swing the election in Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton’s favor.

If anything, Trump discourages his own supporters by claiming the election is fixed for him to lose. Therefore why vote? It won’t matter anyway.

In his warped way of thinking, the election must be rigged because he’s behind in the polls, which makes Trump a rotten loser in advance.

And if Trump wins, wonders San Joaquin County’s Erdman, “does that mean he was in on the fix?”

This story was originally published October 19, 2016 at 5:15 PM with the headline "Trump’s rigged election claim doesn’t register with region’s registrars of voters."