WEST SPRINGFIELD — Voters should feel confident that their votes are being counted, the town clerk said recently in response to comments at a Town Council meeting.
“We take voter fraud very seriously,” Town Clerk Otto Frizzell said. “In my tenure, we haven’t had any substantiated issues [or] reports of voter fraud.”
At the Aug. 19 meeting, volunteers with a group called United Sovereign Americans asked councilors to pass a resolution calling for stricter voting security procedures in Massachusetts. They cited an “open-source audit” of the 2022 general election in Massachusetts that their group conducted. The audit found more than 750,000 “ineligible or uncertain registration violations in the voter roll database”; that more than 87,000 more votes were counted than there were voters who voted; and 265,000 “apparent voting violations.”
Cynthia Montano, one of the five people who gave the United Sovereign Americans presentation, said “the laws are being ignored,” and Massachusetts elections are “not producing an accurate, trustworthy result.” Montano lives in West Springfield, as do two of the other presenters. The other two presenters were from Agawam and Greenfield.
Councilor Frederick Connor said the group’s presentation was “something that I think is worth our attention.” He commended the volunteers for starting what he hoped would be a conversation among councilors.
Frizzell said he agreed that voter fraud is “serious” when it occurs, but said in Massachusetts, “it is not as prevalent as people say it is.” He didn’t have any comment on the specifics in the presentation, as he had not had a chance to look at the group’s findings.
After the meeting, one of the volunteers who spoke to the council said the group’s concerns are about laws and perceived irregularities in Massachusetts as a whole, and that the United Sovereign Americans report did not address whether there was any illegal voting or procedural concerns in West Springfield in particular.
There’s no conspiratorial “them” that runs elections in West Springfield, Frizzell said. The entire process is conducted by the everyday staff of the town clerk’s office and by poll workers who are also West Springfield residents, often accompanied by West Springfield police officers.
“There’s no outside influences in play who are somehow contorting the results or anything like that,” Frizzell said. “We put a lot of effort and a lot of hours to make sure the elections are fair and transparent.”
Mail-in ballots are guarded closely from tampering, Frizzell said. He said he has an arrangement with the post office to pick up the blank ballots directly from the clerk’s office — not to leave them sitting in a mailroom — and to deliver voted ballots to the clerk. As soon as the voted ballots come in, they are stored in the clerk’s locked vault. On Election Day, they are counted in the clerk’s office.
On the morning of Election Day, unvoted ballots are taken to the town’s polling places under the supervision of a police officer, and at the end of the day, the voted ballots are returned to the clerk’s office by the same process.
“That’s a direct chain of custody from me and my staff to the police officer to the polls,” Frizzell said.
