Election security and voter fraud risk low in Allen County

The Allen County Election Board, Allen County Republican Party Chairman, and Allen County Democratic Party Chairwoman all believe the risk of voter fraud or insecure voting is low in the county.

I'm hunter petroviak.thanks for joining us.the question of whether mail-in votes are safe has been a topic of discussion across the country for several weeks.but is there that same conc rn here locally?fox 55 caleb saylor tell us more about election security here in allen county.

Inside the allen county election hq, workers are preparing to mail out absentee ballots.

The concern across the country is whether those votes get counted.

Director of elections in allen county beth dlug says both a republican and democrat are working together to count votes, so intentionally defrauding the voting system would be hard to accomplish here locally.

"it would take quite a bit to do something on a widespread scale fraud.

And it would require people to work in collusion with each other, especially people from different parties because of this bipartisan nature of how we handle things.

When talking about mail-in voting, the biggest thing to look for is ballot harvesting, which is when someone drops off a ballot for someone else not in their household.

Unlike in o her states, that illegal in indiana and they check the id of people handing in ballots.

The envelopes used don contain any personal information and those envelopes are put inside another envelope for extra security.

Chairman of the allen county republican party steve shine has no concerns about voter fraud this year, especially because mail-in voting is restricted in indiana here has been nothing in allen county that has ever given us any suspicion or reason to believe that our votes are not safe weather that's done through the electronic voting machine or whether it's done through absentee balloting.

County democratic chairwoman misti meehan feels the same, despite believing mail-in voting should be allowed.

Verything that the allen county election board does is on the up-and-up every time they have to do anything where there's teams and democrats and republicans they are always present...i just don't have a lot of concerns in allen county that perhaps a lot of the rest of the country or perhaps other parts of the state are facing.

Security concerns like hacking voting m concern on shine or meehan either.

Dlug sayse out of we lock down, the allen county election pushed asn for no excuse absentee voting and believes what they did during the primary will help keep everyone safe.

Ll of the safeguards that we put into place which we intend to continue to use for the general election we believe that that will keep our voters and their workers safe.- if you are voting by mail, you e encouraged to apply for your ballot and return it as soon as possible.

Shine says they'll be adding safeguards for people who need rides to the polls on election day and meehan s be they won driving people to the polls to protect everyone from covid-19, but if you are revented from voting due to the unavailability of transportation to the polls, you are eligible to vote by mail.