Presidential elections are increasingly scrutinized.
Ahead of the 2024 presidential election, KIRO 7’s Brandon Thompson looked at every step your ballot goes through — from the moment you drop it off until it’s counted and stored.
The first step is to bring the ballots into the building.
“What we do here is the team brings back bins of ballots,” said Julie Wise, King County elections director. “They are getting fuller closer to Election Day.”
Teams of two unload the ballot boxes and secure them with unique numbered tabs.
It’s about the chain of custody, where the ballots are then sent through a machine that verifies the voter’s status and inventories the voter’s signatures.
According to Director Julie Wise, the staff has been trained by the Washington State Patrol to verify and compare signatures.
Ballots are removed from the envelope and security sleeve and sent through the machine.
“It provides a level of secrecy to their ballot and to their vote,” Wise said.
The ballots are divided into groups of 250 and finally they are ready to be counted.
“Now we’re not counting the actual votes, right? We can’t do that until 8 p.m. on election night, but we can do all these other processes and steps that lead up to that,” Wise said.
The computers and machines that count the votes are not connected to the Internet and never will be. The results are sent via an Ethernet cable to a server room that only five people have access to.
“As Director of Elections, I’m not even one of them,” Wise added.
The results are stored there and only announced after 8 p.m. on election night.
“The staff physically goes in there after 8 p.m., collects the results, takes them to a computer that is actually on the network and posts the results on the website,” Wise explains.
These are the results we’re all waiting for on Tuesday night.
After that, the ballots are not quite ready yet; they are kept for almost two years, or whenever the lawsuits are completed. The 2020 ballots were held until earlier this year.
