Polling locations on Election Day are open till 7 p.m., however some polling places may nonetheless have folks ready in line at closing time.
By legislation, these voters should get the chance to solid their ballots. Some voters have needed to wait a number of hours to solid their ballots on Election Day in earlier years, equivalent to throughout the 2020 primaries, when the traces prolonged for hours after closing time.
This could delay the reporting of election outcomes.
As soon as all ballots are solid at a voting location, polling location supervisors have a sequence of safety measures to comply with. Earlier than leaving the polling location, they need to fill out paperwork with particulars concerning the variety of ballots counted by poll scanning machines and the variety of voters who checked in to vote. They need to additionally pack up the ballots and different objects and transport all of them again to the county’s central counting station — the place the place ballots are tallied, vote totals are decided and unofficial outcomes are generated on election evening.
All of this is a vital a part of the method. Polling location supervisors should pay shut consideration to element and guarantee every thing — ballots, paperwork and tools — is accounted for earlier than it’s delivered to the central counting station. In Collin County, this step can take ballot employees as much as an hour to finish after they’ve processed all voters and polls have closed.
“What you’re talking about here is election integrity. You have to ensure that you have a good chain of custody, meaning your documents show every single aspect of what’s happened at that polling site,” stated Bruce Sherbet, Collin County election administrator.
In giant counties, getting ballots and tools again to the county’s central counting station can take time and delay the election outcomes. Large Harris County can have election outcomes coming in from 700 polling places. One among them, in Baytown, east of Houston, is 40 minutes away from county election headquarters.
To hurry up the method, Harris and different giant counties can have designated substations across the county the place election employees can drop off their supplies to get the vote counting began.
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Tarrant County, which is able to function 349 polling places on Election Day, can have seven websites the place election employees can ship supplies, stated Clint Ludwig, the county’s election administrator. Harris County officers stated they’ll have six websites throughout the county.
As soon as every thing is turned in, election directors then evaluate and confirm the knowledge from every polling web site. Counties should submit the comparability of the variety of voters and the variety of voted ballots on their election web sites.
