With the Nov. 4 general election coming up, the Kitsap County Auditor’s Office has published the voters’ pamphlet online ahead of ballots being mailed out.

Every house with a registered voter will receive a pamphlet, Kitsap County Auditor Paul Andrews said. Ballots will be mailed to voters by Oct. 17.

“The role of the auditor is actually everything to do with elections. Each county is responsible for administering their own elections under the guidance of the Secretary of State, and so we do all of the administration,” he said.

Andrews said changes with the United States Postal Service to mail collection times from twice a day to once a day could delay postmarking and processing of ballots, which in turn could impact the counting of ballots.

“The Postal Service has made some changes to their procedures and how they collect ballots and how they process them, and I would hate to see somebody take their ballot in with a couple of days before the election and then have it not get postmarked in time and get to us and then we can’t count your ballot, he said. “State law is very specific that your ballot must be postmarked by election day for us to be able to count it.”

A USPS spokesperson confirmed by email that the changes are not ballot-specific and apply to all mail and packages in an effort to bolster efficiency of collection, transportation and processing.

Andrews encourages voters wishing to use USPS to mail their ballots at least a week before election day. Within one week of election day, Andrews encourages voters to use one of 28 ballot drop boxes located throughout the county.

One of the current challenges election officials have had to grapple with is misinformation.

“There’s a lot of moving parts and pieces that happen during an election,” he said. “ (The public doesn’t) understand all of the nuances and all of the validations and the testings and the audits and everything that we do throughout an election.”

Andrews encourages anyone uncertain about the election process to either watch the livestream available online on the Kitsap County elections webpage or come down and observe the election process in person. The cameras run 24/7.

“Information moves so quickly, and there’s so much misinformation that comes out that by the time we get a chance to respond to it, so much more misinformation has now been generated,” he said. “ We’re constantly trying to play catch-up to that, and so that’s our biggest challenge when it comes to the integrity of it. We’ve taken a lot of steps to build a lot of transparency in everything we do.”

The auditor’s office employs a staff of 10 employees year-round and includes between 50-150 poll workers to assist in election processing. Poll workers have a variety of backgrounds, ranging from shipyard workers to delivery drivers.

“The cool thing with the poll workers is these are your neighbors. These are people who live in your community. You might go to church with them,” he said. “They might be retired school teachers.”

Andrews said poll workers go through background checks and are verified before they ever handle ballots.

“We train them, and we have a big returning group of people. We don’t get a lot of turnover in it. It’s very surprising how many people worked that first election and they have found their calling. They feel like they’re doing some civic duty. They’re helping democracy. And it’s fun,” he said.

Candidates on the ballot are prohibited from participating in election processing in the race they are running in. However, Andrews said they are welcome to observe the process.

Before the election

The ballot counting machines have to be approved by the United States Election Assistance Commission before they are used in an election. EAC is an independent bipartisan commission that aims to support the administration of elections and help Americans participate in the voting process. The EAC takes the software used on ballot-counting machines and tests and validates the results to ensure they perform the way they’re supposed to. The county conducts their own tests and validates that it receives the same results as the EAC, Andrews said.

“When we’re not actually conducting an election, we’re maintaining the voter database. We have just over 200,000 registered voters in Kitsap County, and we do about 80,000 edits to that database every year,” he said.

Edits can include changes of address and adding new or removing voters who have either moved away or passed away, he said.

After the election

The auditor’s office selects six batches of ballots, or roughly 1,200 ballots, to do a hand count of a specific race and compare it to the machine count of the same ballots.

“We do that to verify that on election day, the equipment is still counting correctly as it was when we tested it during that logic and accuracy test, so we do a hand count on a set of ballots to compare it against the machine count,” he said.

Before certification, the auditor’s office conducts a risk analysis audit, which Andrews describes as an analysis of the election as a whole, where officials randomly draw or are told by state officials which races they need to audit.

“We will have to then randomly pull so many ballots out of all of the ballots that we’ve counted, and we do a comparison of the digital cast vote record with the physical ballot to make sure that those two match up as well,” he said.

Andrews said in Kitsap County, they have completed risk analysis audits since 2022, ahead of the statewide risk auditing audit, which started during last year’s 2024 general election.

“We want to count as many ballots as we can. We want the voters to have the ability to have their voice expressed through who they voted for. So we want as many returned on time as possible,” he said.

To learn more about the election process, visit kitsap.gov/elections