HAMPTON ROADS, Va. (WAVY) — It is imperative to make sure your vote counts. The safety of mail-in voting has come into question over the last couple of months, so WAVY.com spoke with Dr. Natalie Scala of Towson University. She’s part of a research project focusing on election security, including mail-based voting.

Dr. Scala says the first part of election security involves poll workers and polling places.

“We want to make sure that your votes have integrity. Meaning from the moment you cast that vote to the moment it’s counted, nothing happens to it. It’s exactly as you wanted it to be. So, the first piece looks at poll workers and polling places. Poll workers are our first line of defense, so we want to make sure that they are trained and ready to make sure nothing happens.”

When coronavirus concerns came into play, Dr. Scala says their research began to focus on mail-based voting. What are the potential threats? How safe is it overall?

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“The research really shows that this is safe and we have to remember, too, that we’ve done mail based voting for pretty much every election. The question is scale this time. Right?”

Hundreds of thousands of people are expected to vote by mail in Virginia and North Carolina. So what does Towson’s research show about potential threats to ballots by mail?

“We look at three different kinds of ways to understand threats. So, the difficulty for an attacker to actually execute that, how difficult it is for them. The cost of them to do it, how much money, and then the difficulty for us to figure out something went wrong,” says Dr. Scala.

She goes on to say, “And since there’s ballots all over the place, and distributed across multiple mail boxes, and drop boxes in some states, different ways to return it, there’s not a central location that can be necessarily attacked. So, we actually found that mail-in voting overall is quite secure.”

Dr. Scala makes it clear, if you vote by mail, you should have confidence that your vote will count.

“We have checks and balances in place in the Board of Elections, we have bipartisan teams watching things. We have audits post election. So if something would go wrong, we’re going to find out about it, and the research that we’ve done has shown that the higher threats in general, and I use ‘higher’ losely because it’s relative, we’re already talking about a low threat to begin with, but the more likely threats could be some sort of human based threat inside the process or with a voter and, again, there’s so many checks and balances, we’re going to find out about it. Historically we’ve found out about it and with, I think, the heightened awareness this year, we’re definetly going to find out about it.

Dr. Scala says if you choose to vote by mail, the most important things you can do include following the deadlines to make sure your ballot is in the mail in time to be counted. She also says follow the directions to a T on your packet. Remember to sign your name if your ballot requires, and if you need a witness signature, get one.

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