With questions about ballot safety on many people’s minds in the run-up to this year’s state elections and next year’s presidential election, Middlesex County Electoral Board Chair Barbara Cockrell addressed the issue during a meeting of CircleUp Middle Peninsula held on Sunday at the Gloucester County Library.

Cockrell has a long history of working on elections. She is a past voter registrar for Middlesex County and a former administrator at the Virginia Board of Elections. Beyond that, she spent many years traveling to Eastern Europe to observe elections for the Office of Democratic Institutions and Human Rights, and she served as a voter registration supervisor and election supervisor for the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.

The seven countries she worked in all came out of the Soviet bloc when the Soviet Union was dismantled, she said. They were Bosnia, Serbia, Kosovo, Belarus, Ukraine, Moldova and Kyrgyzstan.

While the outcomes of e...