In compliance with California law, all voting equipment used by the Registrar of Voters in Vote Centers and our office is not connected to the internet, which includes our ballot-on demand printers, accessible ballot marking devices, ballot scanners, and tally room servers and workstations. 

Our voting equipment and voting system are air gapped from all other systems and networks used by the Registrar of Voters. And, the equipment lacks any hardware that would allow it to connect to the internet. 

The separate election management system contains the voter registration database, candidate filing information, voting locations, and petitions. It does send and receive encrypted voter registration information over secure cloud servers connected to the statewide voter registration system VoteCal and to the poll books used in Vote Centers to check in voters. 

The tracking and sharing of voter participation data in the election management system helps us prevent voters from successfully casting two ballots within Orange County or one within Orange County and another in a second county in the state. 

The election management system and the voting system are two separate and distinct State-certified systems that are not connected to each other. 

The election management system tracks whether a voter cast a ballot in an election. But it does not contain ballot data, votes, or results. 

The voting system contains ballot information, including ballot images, cast vote records, and vote tallies. But it does not contain voter information to ensure the votes on every voter’s ballot remain secret even to the Registrar of Voters. 

The Registrar of Voters cannot provide voters with direct proof that the votes on their ballots were counted as cast for the following related reasons: 

1. California voters have a state Constitutional right to vote a secret ballot. 
2. There is no information on the ballots that identifies the voter who cast it. 
3. Therefore, the Registrar of Voters cannot find a voter’s specific ballot amongst all the ballots cast in an election. 

However, the Registrar of Voters takes election accuracy and integrity very seriously, completing numerous steps to ensure the County's state-certified voting system accurately counts votes. 

• Secretary of State staff hand-delivered the voting system software to the Registrar of Voters, which is loaded onto all voting system equipment before each election and removed from the equipment after the election. We confirm the software has not been modified before and after each election. 

• Before and after each election, test ballots are run through each ballot scanner used in an election to ensure each is working properly and accurately counting the votes on the test ballots. 

• Every voter casts a paper ballot so that we can audit the accuracy of the voting system. During the canvass period of each election, the Registrar of Voters hand counts all of the ballots in at least one percent of precincts that are randomly selected to audit the results of every contest on the ballot.