Counting Trust: Election Integrity Monroe County, Without the Slogans

Election Integrity Monroe County. The phrase “election integrity” tends to set off alarms. For some, it is a polite way of saying “you cannot trust the count.” For others, it is the banner under which confidence is restored through rules, audits, and daylight. On our latest episode of The Next Steps Show, Monroe County Board of Elections Commissioners Peter Elder (Republican) and Jackie Ortiz (Democrat) joined us in studio for a rare and candid look at how elections are actually administered. No theatrics. No hedging. Just a walk-through of the machinery of a republic and the places where that machinery can grind or slip.

What follows is a detailed account of that conversation, grounded in facts, procedures, and direct quotes. The goal is not to score points. It is to equip citizens with the knowledge needed to participate with both vigilance and confidence.

Why Bipartisan Design Still Matters:

New York’s county election boards are bipartisan by statute. That is not a slogan; it is an operating configuration, from the two commissioners at the top to the election inspectors in the field. The central point, as Elder explained, is that the system is built so “there is no advantage or disadvantage to any side.” Every sensitive step in the chain of custody—ballots, machines, poll books, tabulation—has eyes from both major parties on it.

This structural choice is the first guardrail. It does not make disagreement disappear. It makes disagreement productive. In practice that means procedures are written, steps are witnessed, and results are auditable.

Commissioner Ortiz underscored that the procedures are spelled out in New York Election Law—from inspector training and testing requirements to list maintenance and post-election audits. “All of this is truly spelled out in what exactly we are supposed to be doing,” she said. Where local boards have discretion, they can add enhancements; but the baseline is not invented on the fly.

Training, Testing, and Auditing: How the Work Is Done:

The unglamorous core of election integrity is repetition done well. Inspectors are trained and tested. Machines are tested before deployment and audited after use. Elder put it plainly: “We do not just test our voting machines going out the door, we actually audit them when they come back.”

Monroe County is also modernizing equipment. The county is rolling out ES&S (Election Systems & Software) machines to replace aging units that had reached the end of their supported life. These systems are state and federally certified. Certification does not mean blind trust; it means the machines must meet defined standards and are still subject to local testing and auditing.

To make oversight easier, the Board has moved operations to 435 Smith Street and created a Public Viewing Area. Members of the public can watch key processes in real time. As Ortiz told listeners earlier in the year and reiterated on air, “transparency is not optional. It is our operating system.” Elder added that bringing the entire operation under one roof for the first time in roughly 120 years will further standardize processes and public access.

By the Numbers: Monroe County’s Election Footprint:

Numbers help citizens visualize the scope of the work. On air, we cited the following Monroe County figures:

• Registered voters: approximately 502,242

• Polling sites: 215, all ADA-compliant

• Poll workers trained: approximately 3,542

• Voting machines: 1,175 total, including about 1,000 ExpressVote XL units

• Early voting sites: 17

• Annual budget: approximately $14.4 million

Scale changes both the difficulty and the discipline required. Training thousands of workers, securing hundreds of sites, and auditing more than a thousand machines is not a part-time job. It is a logistics campaign.

Data Integrity: The Snapshot Problem:

A large share of public debate now lives in spreadsheets: database snapshots, error counts, and cross-tabbed claims. The commissioners did not dismiss that work. In fact, both welcomed the scrutiny. But they cautioned about timing—the difference between a state-level database snapshot and constantly updated local records.

Registrations, moves, and deaths flow into county systems daily, especially in the eight weeks before an election. The state’s centralized data may lag for a time. If you compare a fresh county list to a week-old state snapshot, you can manufacture contradictions that are not errors so much as different moments in time.

Elder offered a practical example that their office investigated: a cluster of registrations dated January 1, 1980. Rather than a conspiracy, the pattern mapped to a technical artifact—older systems batched registrations and posted them with that date. The point is not that anomalies do not exist. It is that anomalies deserve explanations grounded in process before they harden into allegations.

Deceased Voters and the Cross-State Gap:

One of the most emotionally charged claims is that “deceased voters remain on the rolls.” The commissioners addressed this directly. Within New York State, counties receive death data from the Department of Health; those records trigger lawful removals. The gap is out-of-state deaths. If a New York registrant dies in Florida or Pennsylvania, New York does not automatically receive that record. In those cases, counties often learn through family notifications or returned mail.

That is not an excuse. It is a governance design problem that calls for cross-state data sharing. Ortiz acknowledged the gap and referenced the possibility of legislation to improve interstate data exchange. In other words, there is a difference between a board failing to act and a board operating within the boundaries of present law and data pipelines.

Allegations, Lawsuits, and an Open Door:

Our phone lines lit up with tough questions. Volunteers and leaders from New York Citizens Audit (NYCA) joined the discussion, including Marley Hornick. They pressed several claims drawn from their reviews of New York records over multiple cycles:

• Duplicate registration concerns: the same name, address, and date of birth appearing with multiple state voter ID numbers.

• Compliance claims: over five million registration records statewide lacking sufficient information to determine eligibility under state law, and in 2022, approximately 745,000 votes counted from records they deem non-compliant.

• Certification discrepancy claim: the 2024 election certified with roughly 127,000 more votes than voters who voted, based on voting history data.

• Scale of duplicates: about 1.8 million suspected duplicates statewide, potentially violating federal law (HAVA/NVRA).

The commissioners did not litigate the numbers on air. They offered something better: “Bring the records. Sit down with us.” Ortiz made the invitation explicit: “My door is open… If there are problems, we will work to fix them here, and advocate for broader solutions where appropriate.”

That is the correct next step. Claims that large deserve a record-by-record examination with shared ground truth: the county’s live system, the state snapshot used by auditors, the timing of each list-maintenance action, and the statutory rules that govern each status change.

Administration vs. Policy: Know the Difference:

Many public frustrations conflate policy choices with administrative duties. For example, voter ID requirements and DMV opt-in/opt-out processes are set by law, not by county boards. As Elder put it, “Our job is to administer the law.” Ortiz added, “We have to follow the law as written.”

Citizens who want voter ID at the polls have every right to advocate for legislation. Boards will implement whatever the law requires. Confusing administrators with lawmakers is a recipe for misplaced anger and missed opportunities for reform.

When Irregularities Are Found:

Not every irregularity is theoretical. The commissioners stressed that when issues are discovered, they are documented and referred. “We actually have reported them… We report them to the DA and then they take it from there,” Elder said, noting a prior case out of Perinton as one example. County boards do not prosecute crimes; they escalate them to the proper authorities.

Here the public’s role matters. If you have specific records that you believe indicate ineligibility, duplication, or fraudulent activity, the most constructive thing you can do is bring them to the Board. If the issue is real, it can be fixed or referred. If it is a timing or data-source artifact, you will learn why, and we will all be smarter the next time the pattern pops up online.

The Volunteer Path: Become an Inspector:

There is a healthy way to turn skepticism into civic strength: serve as an election inspector. Both commissioners encouraged it. The work is paid, the training is serious, and the perspective is invaluable. If you worry about chain of custody, adjudication, or closing procedures, there is no substitute for spending an Election Day at a polling place, shoulder to shoulder with people who disagree with you politically and agree with you procedurally.

The Civic Mood: Doubt, Scrutiny, Stewardship:

You could feel the temperature in the room rise when callers relayed claims about duplicates and compliance. You could also feel the tone change as specifics and invitations replaced general accusations. Doubt is not a sin against democracy. Doubt that refuses examination is. When citizens and administrators sit at the same table over the same ledger, doubt becomes scrutiny, and scrutiny matures into stewardship.

The Scripture we read on air, Proverbs 11:3, captures the standard: “The integrity of the upright shall guide them.” Integrity is not a feeling. It is a pattern of decisions under pressure. It is also a willingness to fix what is fixable and to admit where systems need better inputs, better laws, or better engineering.

What Citizens Can Do Next

1. Observe. Visit the Public Viewing Area at 435 Smith Street. Seeing beats speculating.

2. Volunteer. Serve as a poll inspector. You will never look at an election rumor the same way again.

3. Document and Engage. Bring specific concerns and verify them with county data. Measure twice, cut once.

4. Advocate. If you want voter ID or better death-data sharing, talk to lawmakers.

5. Vote. Confidence grows by use, not by abstention. Early voting begins Saturday, October 25. Check county hours and locations.

Confidence Without Naivete:

It is fashionable to say “trust the system.” That is not an argument; it is a bumper sticker. The better approach is test the system and then trust what survives the test. In Monroe County, the test includes bipartisan administration, statutory training and audits, a new public viewing area, and an open invitation to reconcile contested records side by side.

Two lines from the show are worth keeping:

• “Transparency is not optional. It is our operating system.” — Commissioner Jackie Ortiz

• “Our job is to administer the law.” — Commissioner Peter Elder

Between those two statements lies a healthy democracy: law that binds, transparency that reassures, and citizens who do more than complain. They get involved.

That is how confidence returns—not by pretending problems never happen, but by proving the process can find them, fix them, and learn from them. Your ballot is not a talisman. It is a tool. Use it.