TAMPA, Fla. — How do officials know they’ve counted every single ballot? What happens to mail ballots, early votes and ballots cast on Election Day? How do they make sure people don’t vote twice?
It’s part of a process called ballot accounting. Those ballots don’t disappear. Every ballot is documented; and if valid, it is counted.
“There are multiple layers of safety, multiple layers of validation to ensure the sorts of things that we're hearing that are being alleged about the election actually don't happen and don't have a chance to occur,” said Jennifer Morrell.
Morrell works with The Elections Group, which has teams on the ground in various states like Michigan and Pennsylvania right now to provide support to election officials.
Morrell focuses on election auditing.
“And that is at the end of the election, making sure that there are that the number of ballots issued to voters equals the number of ballots cast and counted,” she said.
Supervisors around Tampa Bay say you need to know that there is a chain of custody. From the moment you dropped a ballot, to when it was taken back to their office, opened, scanned and counted, they were also counting and tracking security seals and who touched what.
After tabulation, there is another audit.
“They go straight from the high-speed scanners into another device. That's our electronic auditing system. And again, we check the card count to make sure that, ‘Okay, there were 200 that went through the tabulator and there were 200 that went through here.’ If there's a difference, we stop, you know, we back up and look because we want everything to be 100 percent,” said Hillsborough County Supervisor of Elections Craig Latimer.
The same is true of ballots cast in-person during early voting or on Election Day. Election workers reconcile polling place activity.
Pasco County Supervisor of Elections Brian Corley says think of it like balancing a checkbook. They look at how many ballots were issued to voters and how many were cast. If there’s a discrepancy, that is noted. It could be that a voter made a mistake and was issued a new ballot. That ballot is considered “spoiled” and goes into a special envelope.
“Everything's audited, everything's double-counted, everything's balanced. And generally, it's all balanced or under the control of people of different parties at all times,” said Polk County Supervisor of Elections Lori Edwards.
The Florida Division of Elections lists 1,148,266 mail ballots that were issued, but not yet returned.
It’s possible those voters chose not to vote or to vote in person. Some Supervisors of Elections ask voters to surrender those ballots in order to vote a “normal” ballot at the polls, but it is not a requirement in Florida.
In Tampa Bay, all 10 Supervisors of Elections have electronic voter rolls at polling locations that update in real-time and reflect whether someone has already voted.
Supervisors say there’s not a way that the not-yet-returned mail ballots could have been voted by someone else and counted. Each envelope has a barcode unique to the voter. Once you vote, it’s recorded; and any other ballot you were issued is canceled. You also sign the outside of the mail ballot envelope and the signature must match for it to be accepted.
“This election’s over. No new ballots are going to change anything in Polk County or anywhere else in Florida. People can send it in or people can put it on their fridge or people can do whatever they want with it. At this point, it is just about a useless piece of paper,” said Edwards.
The only concern that supervisors of elections have with mail ballots not being returned would be voters hanging on to them and confusing them in future elections.
“This election we got back ballots from the primary, ballots from the presidential preference primary. And I literally got a ballot back from 2006 that somebody put the envelope sent back to us,” said Latimer.
If you do that or did that this election, you need to know that because of how mail ballots are processed, there is no way to notify you of the mistake. Once a ballot is taken out of the envelope and the secrecy sleeve, it goes into a pile. They know how many ballots are in the pile because they are counting, but they do not know which ballots came from which voters.
The old ballot will not count, but it does get accounted for. No ballot is ever thrown away and for this election all of the ballots received will be kept on file for at least 22 months.
Military and overseas ballots that were postmarked by 7 p.m. on Nov. 3 are due back to election offices in Florida by Friday, Nov. 13. They will also go through this same process.
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