The Democracy Factory
For decades, the vote-by-mail business was a sleepy industry that stayed out of the spotlight. Then came 2020.
SEPTEMBER 6, 2020
For decades, the vote-by-mail business was a sleepy industry that stayed out of the spotlight. Then came 2020.
SEPTEMBER 6, 2020
The Democracy Factory
For decades, the vote-by-mail business was a sleepy industry that stayed out of the spotlight. Then came 2020.
A weird thing happened to Andrew Schipke in early March. Schipke is a vice president at Winkler+Dünnebier, a German-born manufacturing company that runs its U.S. operations from a city in eastern Kansas. One of its most popular products is the “inserter,” an obscure but essential component in the business of voting by mail. An inserter stuffs the envelope that contains a ballot and voting instructions. Pick whatever metaphor you like — linchpin, keystone — as long as it conveys that without inserters, you can basically forget about a fair presidential election.
Inserters can cost millions and last a long time. In a typical year, Schipke might sell seven or eight. On the afternoon of March 10, he was sitting in his office when a longtime client called with a last-minute order. Runbeck Election Services, a Phoenix-based ballot printer, wanted ten new inserters. $500,000 apiece. Schipke thought: What the hell?
He started asking around. In the vote-by-mail industry — they call it “VBM” in the trade — everyone knows everyone, so Schipke could swiftly gather intel. It was early March: COVID-19 cases were minimal and lockdowns hadn’t gone national, but VBM people were already predicting an unprecedented scenario. In 2016, a little more than 20 percent of Americans had voted by mail. This year, when polling places could be hobbled on November 3, they were projecting 50 percent. There could be tens of millions of new ballots in the system, and each one would have to be printed, sorted, distributed, and counted. It was the biggest VBM business opportunity of all time, or the prelude to a quite big mess.
In summer, the extra inserters arrived at Runbeck’s headquarters in southeast Phoenix, where a previously unused section of the factory was being cleared for their installation. One of two large ballot printers in the western United States, Runbeck is a family business. In the ’80s and ’90s it was a commercial shop called Runbeck Graphics, churning out magazines and advertising circulars, but when the current CEO, Kevin Runbeck, took it over from his father, he noticed that elections were the most stable part of his revenue stream. Elections were sheltered from the vicissitudes of the market, where the internet was busy killing print. So in 2005, Runbeck pivoted to democracy and changed the name to Runbeck Election Services. In a twisted way, the events of 2020 are confirming the wisdom of that bet: The company is mailing out more ballots than in 2016 and 2018 combined, and it has started diversifying into machine sales, too. Runbeck has developed a product called the AgilisDuo, which helps election officials verify the signatures on ballot envelopes.
Runbeck, 63 and smoothly bald, has been around elections intermittently his whole life. His first job in high school was working for his uncle, who had a contract to prepare punch-card ballots for the 1972 Nixon-McGovern election. (Runbeck made a penny a page.) Spend enough time in the democracy trade, and a person learns not to get political in his speech: A customer is a customer, regardless of party. “Our vision is to restore confidence in the electoral process,” Runbeck told me when I visited the factory in late June. “The reason we’re talking to you is to help the public understand that it’s secure.”
He led me down a metal staircase onto the factory floor. It was a hangar-like space, vast and clean and smelling of fresh print. Gigantic drums of paper were waiting to be fed into inkjet printers the size of minivans. From the ceiling, fans were spraying water vapor: If the air gets too dry, the paper shrinks and optical scanners, which count the votes, won’t be able to read them. There was a SHOOMP-SHOOMP-SHOOMP-SHOOMP coming from somewhere, a rapid-fire suction sound, which we followed to the far side of the floor.
And there it was: a Winkler+Dünnebier BB700-S2 inserter, the thing without which nothing else works. It was 20 feet long and L-shaped, tended by four women in T-shirts. A commercial-grade printer can produce 50,000 ballots an hour, but the process of putting them into envelopes is slower, more intricate. About 14,000 packaged ballots come off the inserter every hour. On the side closest to us, bright-yellow envelopes, stacked in a clear plastic chute, were being sucked down onto a belt with the speed and rhythm of a superfast blackjack dealer. A camera scanned the barcode on the envelope, which was linked to a specific voter-registration file. The computer looked at the file and told the inserter what to put in the envelope, and, like a car chassis traveling the assembly line getting doors and windows and wheels, the envelope traveled down the inserter getting what it needed: the right ballot for the right party for the right election, directions to the right polling place, an instruction sheet for the local races. Octavia Morales, Sacramento County, Republican, Precinct 13453. An “I Voted” sticker was added, and another camera matched the barcode on the ballot back to the barcode on the envelope. If a person tried to vote twice, or send in a fraudulent piece, the computer at the county would notice a mismatch in the barcodes and immediately reject it. At the end, the envelope was sealed, addressed, scanned by a laser beam that ensured the proper thickness, and dropped into a tray to be handed off to the United States Postal Service.
In 2014, an inserter like this one misfired for 35 seconds in the back of Runbeck’s factory. Cameras failed to catch it. As a result, 232 voters in Sacramento and about 1,000 total in Colorado and Arizona received a mismatched ballot-envelope combination. (The other 3.8 million that were mailed out that day were fine.) When the error came to light, the company provided those voters with new, corrected ballots in plenty of time before the election. But the mistake still troubles Runbeck. In his industry, the standard is perfection. “This put us on the front page in Sacramento, Arizona, and Denver, with headlines like ‘Ballot Blunder Jeopardizes Election,’” he said. “We had Fox News in our parking lot at 10 o’clock at night.” The pressure on the industry now exceeds the pressure of any previous election year. Mistakes will be seized, held up to prove the president’s point about an election rigged from the jump. A 35-second misfire in 2020 would have consequences graver than a news truck in the parking lot. Misprinted ballots could lead the national news and strain faith in the mechanics of the democracy. “The market,” Runbeck said, “has changed.”
There’s a document that’s been shared widely across the VBM supply chain this summer, a timeline on which each week is measured by its distance to Election Day. On the day I visited Runbeck’s headquarters, we were in the middle of the third week of June — “minus 139.” At minus 139, the timeline said, even counties where only a tiny fraction of the electorate typically votes by mail could easily place a ballot order, get new machines, and be prepared. “There’s still a window,” Runbeck said. As it gets closer to Election Day, options dwindle. By the second week of September, minus 52, it will be too late for a county or state to contract for ballot production or coordinate with the Postal Service. At minus 7, it will be too late to install drop boxes for voters who want to deposit their ballots in person. At minus zero, we will learn how wisely we used our time.
SINCE THE EARLY 1990S, the portion of votes cast by mail has nosed upward in every presidential-election cycle, hitting an all-time high in 2016: 24 percent, or about 33 million ballots. But the national numbers mask a state-by-state variance. As a rule, voting by mail dominates the western states, while the East typically prefers to vote in person. In the 2018 midterms, returned mail-in ballots accounted for 2 percent of turnout in Arkansas and Kentucky, 4 percent in Pennsylvania and New York, but 66 percent in California, 95 percent in Colorado, and 100 percent in Oregon.
But the state numbers mask another wild variance: that between counties. The United States has no centralized election system. Instead, the job of executing the fundamental transaction in our democracy falls to officials in our 3,100 counties. There’s an individualist, states’ rights spirit to the fracturedness, that old American disinclination to let Washington call the shots. McDonald’s menus are more consistent across county lines than voting technologies are.
In the absence of federal directives, election officials have to shop for every component they need. To run a vote-by-mail election, a county sources two kinds of technology: outbound and inbound. Outbound, which Runbeck handles, is the ballot that goes to the voter. Inbound is what the voter sends back. Outbound requires making something. Inbound requires counting.
There are multiple vendors in each category, hundreds of possible combinations. There are the conglomerate players and independents and family outfits, all in competition for similar contracts. In outbound, there’s Runbeck’s main western rival, K&H, in Washington: the biggest ballot printer in the country by volume. There’s the smaller Bradford & Bigelow, in Massachusetts. There’s Magnolia, in Florida; Midwest Direct, in Ohio. Some printers exclusively do ballots, and some do ballots and other commercial products. Cathedral, in upstate New York, earns about 25 percent of its revenue by printing offering envelopes for churches (the technology transfers to ballots because offering envelopes often need to be personalized, with a thank-you for the previous year’s donation).
Inbound presents its own complications. Mail-in ballots can take a long time to count: Officials have to validate that the envelope is legitimate, then validate that the ballot is legitimate, then match a voter’s signature to the signature in her voter-registration or DMV record. Only then can they look at the vote. In a small county, a few election officials can go through 500 or 1,000 ballots by hand. In a large county, like San Diego or Los Angeles, the millions of inbound ballots must be devoured by a “tabulator” — a counting machine tuned to read the specific type of ballot that the printer has fired off. When counties upgrade their voting systems, ballot printers and tabulation vendors can team up to try to win the business. Runbeck got a contract with Georgia this year because a tabulation company called Dominion Voting Systems won the bid and reeled them in.
Dominion is one of three major tabulation companies in the country. Its rivals are Election Systems & Software (ES&S) and Hart InterCivic. Unlike the ballot printers, which are usually regional and independent, the tabulation vendors control huge swaths of territory and are owned by private-equity firms, which have consolidated the industry from eight players to three within a generation. According to data provided by the private-market research firm PrivCo.com, ES&S, the largest tabulation vendor, earns $20 million of profit on about $150 million of annual revenue. (The other two companies have similar profit margins on less revenue.) These numbers are modest by private-equity standards, but the point is the steadiness of the cashflow. Democracy is a small-time hustle for middle-market firms, not an attractive proposition for Wall Street giants like Blackstone or KKR. The private-equity parent of ES&S also owns a private-label smoked-salmon company and a drinkware company called Corkcicle. The private-equity firm that owns Dominion also operates a self-storage chain. In terms of its scale as a business, American democracy falls roughly into the same category as storage units and vacuum-sealed fish.
ON MAY 8, GOVERNOR GAVIN NEWSOM signed an executive order that said all registered voters in California would receive a mail-in ballot for the November election. More than 75 percent had gotten one for the March primary, so Newsom was calling for 5 million additional ballots. Though the order applied statewide, how it was implemented depended totally on zip code.
Rural Alpine County, in the Sierra Nevada, is the state’s smallest by population, with about 800 registered voters. In the March primary, nearly everyone who voted cast her ballot by mail, but a handful still showed up at the precinct to vote in person. “We had about three people come in,” said Patricia Griffin, the assistant county clerk. “It was kind of exciting. We’ve never had that many come in person in a primary before.” The county prints its own ballots on the entry-level ES&S model, a “Ballot on Demand” machine that looks like a home-office printer. To count, Alpine uses the tiny ES&S DS200, which, according to its marketing materials, could process all of the county’s ballots in under two hours.
Most U.S. counties, like Alpine, are modest: 2,400 have fewer than 50,000 registered voters. There, officials can print their ballots themselves or through a local printer and count them by hand or with low-capacity machines. For vendors, the small counties aren’t the most lucrative; the money’s in the big ones.
In San Diego, one of the most populous counties in California, ballots are ordered in the millions. In the March primary, the county was at 72 percent VBM. Months later, officials were still deciding exactly what quantity K&H, their ballot vendor, should print for November. Then they had to be ready to count all those extra votes. San Diego Registrar Cynthia Paes had purchased a BlueCrest sorting machine that could capture and display the signatures on the envelopes for poll workers to verify. That done, the ballots would be sent to eight optical scanners from Dominion that could count them at a clip of thousands per hour. “That gives us a little more power on election night,” Paes said.
One big county always slips the ballot printers’ grasp. An anomaly in the election business, Orange County converted its print shop for business cards and traffic citations into a ballot operation in 2008 and now prints all of its ballots in-house. Orange’s registrar of voters is a former entrepreneur named Neal Kelley, who sold his chain of one-hour-photo stores on the eve of the digital-camera revolution and decided to try his hand in the public sector. Kelley sees a similarity between the photo business and the democracy one. “It’s the same technology, scaled up,” he told me. “And you have to process people” — customer service. In 2014, Orange was, case in point, among the first counties in California to include an “I Voted” sticker in its mail-in-ballot envelopes. “I had a supervisor who said, ‘What about including a sticker in the envelope?’” Kelley explained. “We started to peel that apart and figure out a way to do it. The biggest challenge was to find a way to apply the sticker so that it came off easily. After we started, L.A. and Riverside copied us. The voters love it.”
VOTE BY MAIL HAS EXISTED in the United States since the Civil War, when the Postal Service carried soldiers’ ballots back to their home counties. But if you were forced to pick a start date for our current VBM era — with its competing private printers and customer-service jargon — you’d probably go with 1974. That was the year Washington became the first state to adopt “no-excuse absentee voting.” (“Absentee” is just an outdated term for “vote by mail.”) Where before a voter had to have a valid reason to request a mail-in ballot, like illness or age, now she could request one for no reason at all.
California went next, in 1978. That year, 4.4 percent of California’s voters used VBM. By 1990, 18 percent were using it — a leap of around 1.2 million ballots. The concept of “convenience voting” came into vogue, the voter as finicky customer. Oregon switched in 1985. It wasn’t a red state/blue state thing, either. Nevada and Wyoming went for opposing presidential candidates in 1992, one year after both states adopted no-excuse VBM. The practice nestled cozily into the civic life of the West, where cities had sprung up later and distances yawned. By 2004, every state west of the Rockies had no-excuse VBM.
Unlike lever machines, VBM left an obvious paper trail. Election officials liked it because it was auditable and transparent: If they thought there was a problem with the count, they could physically count again. Easy. As the technology trickled east, certain states that had previously chosen more-cutting-edge voting methods found themselves veering toward VBM. In 2000, the failure of a ballot-punching machine called the Votomatic delayed election results from Broward County, Florida, inciting a national crisis that culminated in the Supreme Court stopping the recount and allowing George W. Bush to take office. Embarrassed in the spotlight, Florida passed no-excuse vote by mail the following year. Immediately, the portion of votes cast by mail doubled.
Rising demand changed the character of the suppliers. Ballot printing had tended to be a side gig for election companies, a way to earn extra revenue while focusing on tabulators or touchscreens. Now, it was starting to look like a viable business on its own. In 2005, the same year Kevin Runbeck changed the name of his commercial-printing outfit from Runbeck Graphics to Runbeck Election Services, Georgia and Ohio passed no-excuse vote by mail. Today, only 16 states still require an excuse to obtain a mail-in ballot. Amber McReynolds, CEO of the nonprofit National Vote at Home Institute, told me the benefits of VBM are evident: “It allows every citizen in this country to vote in a more accessible way.”
Any technology that does that, of course, will be the target of voter-suppression efforts. This year, in Texas, the Republican attorney general has refused to add “fear of contracting COVID-19” to the list of acceptable excuses to vote by mail, an omission that, because of the state’s demographics, will primarily affect younger Black and Latino voters who have to work on Election Day. Other tactics are blunter. Upon taking the office of postmaster general in June, the Republican donor Louis DeJoy ordered the Postal Service to scale back overtime hours, which are essential for timely mail delivery. These efforts have been sanctioned and boosted by President Trump, who, since the spring, has attacked vote by mail on the basis that it would incite widespread voter fraud. (Cases of mail-in-ballot fraud are infinitesimally rare; a database maintained by the conservative Heritage Foundation has recorded only 204 instances in the past 20 years.) The data show that mail-in voting doesn’t favor one party over another, so Trump’s efforts will surely wind up wasting some of his own supporters’ votes. But no matter the risk to his tally, the intended result seems clear: to diminish the legitimacy of the process that could remove him from office. It’s about sowing confusion and doubt.
All the political maneuvering contrasts sharply with the attitudes of the foot soldiers in the counties, who don’t have much power but believe in the process itself. Those who work in VBM talk about physical ballots tenderly, as though they were people. A ballot that’s missing a signature, or has a signature that doesn’t match the voter record, needs to be “cured” — returned to the voter for fixing. If a ballot gets separated from its envelope before the barcodes can be matched, the two pieces need to be reunited — “married up.” There is an awareness of voting as a plain, human act.
Imperial County, in the irrigated desert along the Mexican border east of San Diego, is 85 percent Latino and the poorest county in California. In the March primary, a little more than a third of its voters used a mail-in ballot, the lowest figure in the state. Imperial fell at the bottom of the list in turnout, too. “You’re talking to a really bad county,” Debra Porter, the Imperial County registrar of voters, told me. “We’re always dead last.”
After Newsom announced his executive order, Porter was able to get state money to purchase twice the usual number of ballots from Imperial’s printer, ProVote. But that merely solved the outbound crisis. For inbound, she wasn’t sure how to count an additional five or ten or fifteen thousand ballots using the hand-held wands that she currently had, which forced her poll workers to scan ballots one at a time, like items at a supermarket checkout. Porter desperately wanted an AgilisDuo, the ballot sorter made by Runbeck, which could automatically scan and display the signatures on the envelopes, one after another. “It would be so much help to us,” she said in early August, sounding exhausted. But she had to ask her board of supervisors for the money — another $15,000, on top of $53,000 already set aside — and even if they finally approved it, the machine would take a while to arrive. Porter isn’t worried about counterfeit ballots. She’s worried about how long it’s going to take to count Imperial’s votes. (In early September, a spokesperson for the county explained that it still hadn’t purchased an AgilisDuo. It was too late for Porter to get one in time.)
IN THE MONTHS BEFORE AN ELECTION, Runbeck employees clock in seven days, 12 hours a day. “It’s a lot of work,” said Rosalva Diaz-Lopez, who operates one of the inserters. “But when you make sure that everything is perfect on the envelope, it’s so rewarding.” After election night, the team locks the factory doors and goes to eat together, or to the bar.
Like all of us, they’re used to watching returns on TV. It’s a custom that dates to the tandem rise of network news and computerized vote tabulation in the mid-20th century, when anchors like Walter Cronkite habituated us to the season-finale-style drama of a same-night result. There’s no inherent reason why we need the results on election night. It’s just something we’re used to. In 1916, the results took two weeks.
The president doesn’t want to wait. “Must know Election results on the night of the Election, not days, months, or even years later!” he tweeted. As those who study elections know, large cities take longer to release their results, and cities tend to be Democratic. The process is known as “blueshift,” where election results drift leftward as more ballots are counted. Interdict the blueshift, control the result.
Trump’s odd insistence on distinguishing mail-in ballots from absentee ballots could be another step toward this goal (“Absentee ballot — great,” he told an Atlanta audience in July. “Mail-in ballot — absolutely no good”). There’s no real difference, but the linguistic choice is important, because it allows a politician to be clear about whom he’s addressing. Before no-excuse laws, Republicans used what were still called absentee ballots to “bank” the votes of their older constituents well before Election Day. “Absentee” connotes the party-loyalist voter who checks the same box every cycle, often weeks in advance. “Vote by mail” connotes an expanding electorate, first-time and irregular voters: people not traditionally in the Republican base. “It’s not the ballot itself,” said Carol Anderson, the author of White Rage and a historian of voting rights. “It’s who’s using the ballot that’s causing such consternation.”
The deluge of ballots this November will test the limits of the infrastructure. “There are key states moving aggressively into VBM, and not all of them have changed their policies and procedures. That means it’s Election Day and you’ve got tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of votes that haven’t been processed,” said Paul Gronke, professor at Reed College and an expert on early voting. “We have to be prepared for there not to be a result on election night. What happened in Florida in 2000 was only one or two counties. Here it will be multiple states. Unless it’s a blowout.” A system poised to malfunction “unless it’s a blowout” cannot be called effective. But if the sun rises on November 4 with no winner, fraud of the type the president predicts is not the likely explanation.
The explanation is that someone like Debra Porter is trying to count her ballots with inadequate time and machinery, marrying up the ones that have separated, curing those with missing signatures. The same scene will play out in 3,100 counties, in the highest-pressure media atmosphere in living memory. Everyone will be terrified of making errors. The parties may dispatch lawyers to look over the shoulders of the registrars and clerks. We’ll have a result eventually, though. At that point, according to tradition, the loser is expected to concede.