Like a CPA in the first two weeks of April, Wendy Sartory Link is soon to enter her busiest season. “There are a lot of moving parts,” says Link, Palm Beach County’s supervisor of elections since 2019. Those parts speak to the sheer volume of managing elections in a county that is larger than two states.
The numbers tell part of the story. There are more than 862,000 registered voters in Palm Beach County, who on Election Day (Nov. 5), will cast their ballots at more than 375 polling locations in nearly 900 precincts. (Early voting begins Oct. 21, with fewer but still copious polling places.) Link is responsible for the logistics of an efficient delivery of ballots from such far-flung regions as Pahokee, North Palm Beach and Boca Raton to the voting equipment center in Riviera Beach, where they are reviewed for irregularities and processed. “They haven’t yet given us a helicopter to get them from Belle Glade,” Link says, perhaps jokingly, perhaps aspirationally.
And Link’s office recruits and trains more than 4,000 poll workers—“and of course, all the paperwork and money that goes along with that, getting people timely paid, all the temporary staff we will bring in. We’ll have more voter registrations coming in, vote-by-mail requests, different things in different parts of our business that we’re constantly keeping up with. It gets to be quite a buzz.”
Link’s learning curve has been swift, her career path surprising. A practicing attorney in the Palm Beaches since 1994 (she earned her Juris Doctor at Duke University Law School, class of ‘89), she would be the first to admit that prior to 2019, the top position in the county’s elections infrastructure was not on her radar. “I’m not very political; I haven’t ever been, and I had no interest ahead of time in being supervisor of elections,” she says. “But the opportunity presented itself, and I agreed to take it initially for the first two years, to get us through the 2020 election. And then in doing that, I fell in love with elections, like a lot of people do, and I determined there was more that we could do to make the office better. So I ran for election, and was elected in 2020.”
Palm Beach County, of course, has a checkered past in election integrity. Most of us remember the dark days of 2000—the butterfly ballot, the hanging chad. Perhaps more than anything, it’s Link’s job to ensure that such horror stories remain the stuff of ancient history. Which is why three words, as Link explores in our first question, have become a mantra in her office and public appearances.
Your website touts “transparent secure democracy.” Why can we trust the transparency and security of our vote in Palm Beach County?
We spend a lot of time doing voter education so that the voters can understand what we do; they can see the process. We are always looking to increase voter registration and enhance access by making sure that people know when we’re open to the public. We’ve got tours of our facility. So we are doing all we can with voter registration and explaining to people all the processes and safety procedures we have in place so they feel confident of the elections.
What happens to our ballot once we submit it through the scanner, and how is it counted?
When you’re at the polling location, and you’re putting it into the DS200, which is a precinct scanner, the machine is actually counting it. And if there’s a mistake on your ballot—perhaps you voted twice in an election that only allows you to vote for one candidate—it will give you a notification that says “You voted twice in the race for dogcatcher,” let’s say. “Do you want your ballot back, so you can correct it, or do you want to cast this ballot anyway?” And if they want to cast it again, they get a new ballot, and it will spoil the old one. Once it’s properly counted, you’ll get something that says, “thank you for voting,” and that indicates your ballot has been accepted, and each of the races for which you voted will be counted.
So if you choose not to correct it, will the ballot be spoiled?
If you choose not to correct it—if you don’t care about dogcatcher anyway, and you don’t want to deal with it—all of the other races that you voted for will be counted. But that particular race won’t be counted.
Where do these ballots go, in perpetuity?
So once the ballots have run through the precinct scanner, then that night the ballots are brought back to our warehouse, and we will keep them in case there is a recount, or if there are public-records requests to see them. And then after 22 months, if there are no open lawsuits and no open public-records requests, then we go through a procedure where we confirm with the state that they also don’t have any information that would mean someone needs to still see that ballot, and then they are destroyed.
Voting by mail was, of course, extremely popular in 2020. Is that an increasingly desirable option?
It’s yet to be determined. We currently do not have as many vote-by-mail requests as we did in 2020. So at the end of 2022, there was a statute that said that following the 2022 general elections, all vote-by-mail requests have expired. It required anybody who wanted to vote by mail to make an affirmative contact with our office in some way to request a vote-by-mail ballot. We have about 160,000-plus, currently, who have made that request, but we had at least twice that number in 2020.
How can those who vote by mail confirm their vote was received and counted?
There are a couple of different ways they can do it. They can go on the website, votepalmbeach.gov. They go to the My Status button and put in their last name and birth date. It will take them to their page, which tells them everything we know about them—party registration, address, their precinct. And it will also tell them we have a vote-by-mail request on file for them. But then it will tell them what day we mailed it out, and what day we received it back from them. It will also tell them whether or not there has been a concern with their ballot; perhaps they forgot to sign it, or their signature didn’t match and they need to cure it; and it will tell them how to do that. And then it will also tell them that it’s been counted.
The other option they have is, they can sign up for BallotTrax, for free, through our website, and they can tell us that they want to get their notification by phone, by text or by email. They can even give us parameters for what hours we’re allowed to contact them. And then we will contact them that way to give them that same information.
Photo ID is required in the state of Florida. Some argue that we need photo ID to prevent fraud. Can you speak to whether voter fraud is an issue in need of addressing in Palm Beach County?
If you have an ID, then [poll workers] are going to be able to look at that at the polling location. So there’s going to be very little fraud that occurs there. If you don’t have a picture ID with you, you are not denied the right to vote. You’re still going to be able to vote your ballot, but it’s going to be put into a provisional envelope, and you’re going to sign it, you’re going to put all of your information there, and that will come back to our office. Our office will then do the research, just to confirm that, yes, this is the correct address for this voter. They’ll check the signature on it. They’ll present that to the three-person canvassing board in an open meeting. And the canvassing board, looking at that provisional ballot envelope—not seeing the ballot itself, because it’s still sealed—will determine whether or not that ballot should be counted. It’s very akin to a vote-by-mail ballot at that point. It will either be counted or not, and the voter will be notified if it wasn’t counted.
Have there been specific groups of voters who have been disenfranchised by the photo-ID law?
I don’t think so, because you don’t have to have a driver’s license. You can have a Florida ID. There are 12 different types of ID you can have. It can be a number of other things, and you can even do a combination of two different ones. If you have one that’s a photo ID but that doesn’t have a signature, but you have something else that has your signature, you can combine those to get there. We have not had very many people say, “I don’t have any of these available to me.”
How are write-in votes counted?
When people put down Mickey Mouse or Donald Duck, we don’t even count those. We only count them if it’s a qualified candidate. In order to be a qualified candidate, you have to have submitted your paperwork before the elections. If you do have a qualified write-in candidate, then there’s going to be an oval with a blank space beside it. Then you fill in that oval, and if you write in the name of the qualified candidate, it’s going to get counted.
We’ve already seen political violence in this heated election cycle. What measures can your team take if, for instance, someone shows up to a polling place with a weapon, or acts aggressively toward a poll worker?
No weapons are permitted inside polling locations to begin with, so nobody should be bringing a gun to a polling location. But we do work closely with the sheriff’s department, FBI, Homeland Security, to do all we can to keep voters and our election workers safe. Having a safe and secure voting process obviously is our top priority. But we have Florida statutes that make it a crime to harm the welfare of a public servant. There are a number of statutes out there—against voter coercion, voter suppression, intimidation by force—that are available for deputies to use.
If somebody becomes aggressive, our poll workers would call the local law enforcement. And all of the local law enforcement are given, in advance, what our local polling locations are. So they’re aware that if they get something to that particular address, that that’s likely a polling location issue, and they would prioritize it.
I understand that you are a registered Democrat. Should people take into consideration the party affiliation of their elections supervisor? Is it relevant?
It’s not. The position used to be a nonpartisan position. It changed with a court case in 2020. Right after I was appointed in 2019, I actually switched my party affiliation to NPA, no party affiliation, because I wanted to make it clear that this is a nonpartisan office. Everybody here takes a nonpartisan oath with the work that they do. I have staff members of the Republican and Democratic parties, and some of the minor parties as well. Some are NPA, as I was. But once the court case came out and said that you had to have a party affiliation assigned to you, then I did switch.
But my dedication to this office is completely nonpartisan, as is my staff. We talk about the big three here: integrity, accountability and service. And there’s no room for being partisan in any of that.
What percentage of eligible voters in Palm Beach County actually cast a ballot in the last presidential election?
We had 76.3% voter turnout.
I assume that’s higher than in some other parts of the state.
It is. In 2022, we had the highest voter turnout compared to Broward and Miami-Dade. Because we’re contiguous and we’re all large, we sometimes will benchmark ourselves, and I do know we had a higher percentage of voter turnout than those counties did.
Is part of your job to advocate for the process—to get that number closer to 100%?
It’s our job to educate the voters, to make sure they’re aware of an election. I don’t look at it as my job to reach out to individual party members to get people out to vote. We do want to make sure that we’ve properly educated them, that they know when the election is, they know the three different methods of voting—vote-by-mail, early voting and Election Day—and we make it as easy as we can.
One of the things we had heard is that when you get into a general election, there can be long lines, and some people felt like that was inhibiting them because maybe they were older, they couldn’t stand in a line that long, or their profession dictated they couldn’t be in line for two to three hours. So that’s why we made appointments available, so that within a 15-minute time frame, you can get into a polling location if you have an appointment. We make that very easy to get; you can do it online, you can call our office, you can come to the office. I’m not aware of any other county in the state that does appointments.
Finally, why should we vote? Can you speak to the importance of the franchise itself?
We want everybody to take their civic duty seriously. It’s both a right and a privilege to be able to participate in the democratic process. As I remind students when we go to the schools, this right cost some people their lives. This was paid for at a very high cost by many, and I think we all owe it to ourselves to participate in the process. Whether you like or don’t like every candidate on the ticket, you can skip a race, and that’s fine. But oftentimes, the races down-ballot might have as much, or even more, of an impact on your day-today life. It’s very important we get people out to do that. If you’re participating in our elections, you’re helping shape the future of your city, your county and your country.
This article is from the September/October 2024 issue of Boca magazine. For more like this, click here to subscribe to the magazine.
