Ballot Security

Lincoln County Elections protects the privacy of your vote and works closely with the Oregon Secretary of State's Office to ensure the security of the elections process in our community.

In Oregon, all voting is conducted by mail and has been for 20 years. The concerns expressed across the country about the security of voting simply do not apply in our state.

Each eligible registered voter in Lincoln County will be mailed a ballot as long as that person has an up-to-date voter registration.

Each year, Lincoln County files a security plan with the Secretary of State that details the tools and processes used to secure elections.

Some of the most important security measures being taken to protect your vote include:

• Each day a copy of the voter registration database maintained by the Secretary of State is backed up and saved to ensure accurate information is preserved should an unauthorized party gain access.
• Prior to any ballots being counted, our voting system is tested three separate times for logic and accuracy. This testing entails marking test ballots and running them through the vote counting machines to ensure results match how the test ballots were marked. This same process is followed after the election to confirm there was no change to the programming.
• All ballots are counted in a secure room at the Elections Office. Security cameras are in place wherever ballots are processed.
• No voting systems are connected to the Internet.
• All voting systems (machines and programs) used to count ballots have been certified by a federally accredited voting system test laboratory and have been further analyzed to ensure the system is secure.
• After a general election and prior to certification of the results, an audit of randomly sampled ballots is conducted. This audit requires human beings to review every ballot in the random sample to prove that results produced by the vote-counting machines accurately reflect the marks made by voters.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Bureau of Investigations have confirmed that no vote tally systems in Oregon, or anywhere else in the country, have been hacked.

You can have confidence that your ballot will be counted as you mark it and that there will be no tampering with your ballot at any step in the election process.