Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

As big day nears, all’s quiet at election nerve center

This is where campaign hysteria comes — at long, weary last — to die. It’s been raging across the valley for months, in attack ads, fliers and weaponized sound bites, but come Election Day, it’ll rattle to a halt, and it will do so here.

“Our job is to keep the noise to the side, to keep things orderly,” said Larry Lomax, Clark County registrar of voters, as he worked his way toward what Tuesday will be the nerve center of democracy in action.

Friday, the last day of early voting, seemed like a good time to go backstage at the Clark County Election Department, a vast warehouse on Cheyenne Avenue and Revere Street. Lomax and his staff should have had the day off — for the observation of Nevada Day — but they were there, bustling along the remaining details of their huge task. I mean huge: There are 1,176 precincts that will be served by approximately 4,200 voting machines grouped into nearly 290 polling stations.

A surprising amount of the process is done by hand. Getting the ballots from the polling spot to the tallying room, for example. “Nothing is modemed in,” Lomax said, “although we’re perfectly capable of doing that.” (As Chicago, for example, does.) He doesn’t want even the appearance of vulnerability to hacking. At no point, he emphasizes, are the results entered into a computer system connected to the outside world.

Instead, amid a fussiness of documentation and procedure, poll workers seal the cartridges from the voting machines into metal boxes, and two-man teams drive them to the warehouse.

Lomax winds through the huge complex of offices and echoing storage space, toward the vote-counting chamber. Past the hotline rooms — where office temps will man computers and phone banks to deal with citizens who have questions Tuesday (“Where am I supposed to vote?”), or poll workers who have administrative or technical problems — past the absentee-ballot bullpen, past the mail-ballot handlers, through vast warehouse spaces where polling-location materials are being stored or prepared. By the time it’s over, upward of 3,500 people will work on this election.

And the nerve center? It’s a small, bland office in a corner. A few windows look out into the guts of the warehouse; a dozen or so laptops sit idle. It looks like a shipping office. You might’ve expected something more grand and impressively technical, commensurate with the high stakes and higher production values of recent elections: wall-sized digital screens, maybe, with aerial views of precincts, columns of scrolling numbers and a real-time profile of the election in process.

Maybe that’s just me.

This office is secure, Lomax says. The cartridges are hand-delivered into the room where the computers do the tallying. They are networked only to one another, no other line in or out. Each has a fingerprint ID attachment; you can’t log on if you’re not in the system. During the vote count, the computers pause every 20 or 30 minutes to create a summary of results to that point, which are saved to a disc, confirmed and released to the media. Turns out, this equipment could do an ongoing, real-time update, but that would require a computer line into the nerve center. No deal.

“As we saw (last) week, there are always people who want to undermine the system,” Lomax said, referring to allegations that some early vote totals didn’t match the number of voters — a problem that has since been reconciled — or that some machines were “precalibrated” with votes for Harry Reid. Impossible, he said.

On Tuesday, the energy of the election will transfer from the operatic passions, frenzied advertising and Gothic fabulism of the campaigns, through the voters and into this building, a quiet island of neutral rationality and meticulous process. The noise will abate. At some point, after every cartridge has been logged and sucked dry of votes, Lomax will announce the results.

No doubt he’ll sigh deeply, and, sometime — probably very shortly — thereafter, he’ll surely have this thought:

2012. Obama’s re-election campaign.

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