Faced with allegations of election rigging, local officials are defending the integrity of voting procedures and the volunteers who ensure they are followed.
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump in recent weeks has repeatedly claimed the Nov. 8 election will be "rigged." But Bowie County, Texas, and Miller County, Ark., election officials dismiss the accusation, saying that security measures make ballot tampering and fraudulent voting practically impossible.
"If you don't have any knowledge about what goes on, then you can spout off those things," Bowie County Elections Administrator George Stegall said.
Brandon Cogburn, chairman of the bipartisan Miller County Election Commission, agreed that the notion of an election-rigging conspiracy is far-fetched, best suited to fiction.
"This is not 'Scandal,' like the TV show," he said, referring to the popular drama series' recent plot about a stolen election.
Some recent polling, however, indicates they may have difficulty convincing a skeptical Republican electorate.
A Reuters/Ipsos online poll conducted Oct. 14 to Oct. 20 revealed that nearly 70 percent of Trump supporters think a win by his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, would be the result of illegal voting or vote rigging. More than two-thirds of Trump voters in a USA TODAY/Suffolk University poll conducted Oct. 20 to Oct. 24 said they worry election results could be manipulated.
Stegall blamed the especially emotional tone of this year's election, inflamed by Trump's allegations, for the widespread misperception.
"Many people get caught up with it big time, in other words, extreme nervousness and anxiety. Now, if you have somebody filling your ear with, 'The elections are rigged. The elections are rigged,' then pretty soon you're believing it. You don't have any proof, but you begin to believe it," he said.
Stegall detailed Bowie County's election security procedures, based on a painstaking system of tracking every ballot through the entire voting and counting process. The county uses only paper ballots, no voting machines.
All blank ballots are sealed and kept under lock and key in the Bowie County Courthouse until they are mailed to absentee voters or distributed to polling places, where they are always under the control of election workers.
To cast a ballot by mail, absentee voters must first send the elections office a signed application. Once officials verify the information on the application, they send a blank ballot to the voter, who fills it out, signs it, places it into a secrecy envelope and returns it to the county.
Officials register the receipt of completed absentee ballots and store them in secure lockboxes until the day before Election Day, when a bipartisan board verifies that each application and each ballot is signed and that the signatures match.
The board determines the number of valid absentee ballots to be counted on Election Day. It again stores those ballots in sealed, locked boxes kept in the courthouse elections office.
Election officials and volunteers keep equally close tabs on ballots cast at polling places, whether during early voting or on Election Day.
Each day of voting, workers keep track of how many blank ballots they began with, how many are cast, how many are spoiled-by voters starting to fill them out but making a mistake and needing a new ballot, for example-and how many are remaining when the polls close.
Ballot boxes arrive at polling places locked with two padlocks and closed with a numbered seal. The county sheriff keeps one lock's key, and the election office keeps the other locks.
When the day's first vote is cast, the seal is broken. After the day's voting is complete, the box is resealed. The election office has a record of which seal number goes out and which comes back, so any tampering would be obvious.
Workers then transport ballot boxes to the central counting room in the courthouse, and the counting team again verifies the boxes' seal numbers before opening them.
The ballot count paperwork is reviewed, and any discrepancy between the number of ballots expected and the number received stops the process until the difference can be resolved. Discrepancies are rare and usually due to simple miscounting, Stegall said.
Election officials test the machines that scan the ballots and tabulate votes three times, once before Election Day, once just before they count the votes, and once just after they count the votes. Any problem revealed by the testing renders the machine unusable, and in the unlikely event that all machines had problems, the ballots would be counted manually.
Stegall said election volunteers, often senior citizens considered pillars of the community, are not the kind of people who would take the risks necessary to bypass security measures.
"For a polling place to do it (rig the election), you would need probably six or seven people, at least three or four, willing to commit a felony. I haven't found those. The people volunteering to do this may do one election a year. My average age of judges is 60s, and some of them are in their 70s. So it's a great team," he said.
Stegall's station manager is a noted local lawyer who has done election work for 34 years, and both tabulating managers are also respected lawyers, he said. "Their comment is, 'Do you actually think that I would even hint at my integrity being damaged to change anything?'"
In Miller County, similar measures ensure that voting, conducted there by electronic machine only, is equally secure.
The first step is a tryout, called a logic and accuracy test, of each machine. The county election commission publishes notice of when and where the test will take place, and it welcomes the public to witness it in person.
The voting machines are then stored in a locked room of the Miller County Courthouse. Only Election Coordinator Linda Crawford and volunteer David Orr, a former at-large member of the commission, have access to the room.
Cogburn, the sole Democrat on the bipartisan, three-person commission, emphasized that the machines are never connected to the internet, so anyone "hacking" them would be impossible.
Each machine contains a removable flash drive on which voting is recorded, which is held in place by a strip of security tape.
"When you pull it (the security tape) up, it leaves the word 'void' written on the machine. So you can tell if anybody's been into it," Cogburn said.
Before early voting began Oct. 24, the commission tested each machine again, producing what is called a "zero tape" to ensure it was "clear," storing no votes to begin with.
On Election Day, Orr and volunteers from the Arkansas High School Republican and Democrat committees deliver the machines to polling places.
"These machines are sealed up, locked, zip-tied up, so if they get to the polling place open, you know somebody's messed with it. So there's no way that they can get to them other than to deliver them," Republican commission member Clinton Thomas said. He went on to describe how difficult it would be for someone to tamper with the machines.
"They'd have to have access to the courthouse. They'd have to turn off the security cameras. There's security at the courthouse. Then they would have to be able to access each individual machine, look into each individual machine and do something to it.
"And then they'd have to have access to all the security stuff (security tape, locks, zip-tie seals) we put on them to put back on there. And their knowledge of hacking these machines would almost have to be, I would guess, almost manufacturer knowledge," he said.
Each machine produces a paper record of the votes cast on it, which each voter can see being printed, to further ensure that no tampering with the machine's electronics can happen without causing an obvious discrepancy.
After voting is completed, citizens volunteering at polling places remove each machine's flash drive and place it, along with the machine's paper record, into a locked bag. Each bag and its lock have corresponding numbers to ensure that the lock is not replaced at any point.
Poll supervisors bring the bags to the second-floor courtroom in the courthouse. In a process open to public view, an election commissioner opens each bag, and the flash drive is inserted into a reader attached to a computer not connected to the internet.
That computer tabulates vote totals, which are then printed out and taken downstairs to the county clerk's office. The totals are entered into a clerk's office computer and uploaded to the Arkansas secretary of state's office for central counting.
Again, any discrepancy at that point would be obvious, Cogburn said.
"If what the secretary of state shows is different from what we have, it's easy to see," he said.
"If that ever happened-it's never happened-we would be looking to see what changed from upstairs to downstairs, obviously," Thomas said.
Arkansas' centralized voter registration and tracking system makes anyone voting twice impossible, though a loophole introduces slight risk.
Because of an Arkansas Supreme Court ruling, Cogburn said, poll workers must ask voters for identification, but voters are not required to provide it. To verify he or she is registered on the rolls, an Arkansas voter can instead simply state their name, date of birth and address.
That means potentially, a voter could provide someone else's information and vote as them. That has never happened during his tenure on the commission, Thomas said, but if it did, it would be detected when the person whose identity was stolen tried to vote. At that point, a county prosecuting attorney would begin an investigation.
Thomas expressed his confidence that, at least in Miller County, elections are conducted properly, despite what allegations anyone may make.
"It wouldn't matter if it were a Democrat or a Republican candidate saying this. It wouldn't insult me, because I know in Miller County I trust the people that we work with We have a coordinator that's very honest, very fair, very open about things, who works very hard to ensure there's no problems. So it doesn't bother me. I'm secure in Miller County being a fair and appropriate election," he said.
Stegall agreed that the ultimate outcome is not as important as the process remaining open and fair.
"If you're a legitimate voter, we want your vote in and for it to count. That's what we're doing our best to have done," he said. "Who wins is inconsequential. And I don't know of any other election people who would not completely agree with that, period."