Election Night Behind the Scenes: How Votes Are Counted and Results Reported

The voting experience in the United States isn’t a standardized thing: depending on where you live—even down to the county level—you’re going to use a different piece of equipment to cast your vote at the polling place. This means that how your vote is counted, exactly, will also vary. As of 2016, most Americans will vote using a paper ballot counted via optical scanner. Residents of Washington, Oregon, and Colorado vote by mail, but the ballots are still ultimately tabulated using optical scanners. Voters in seven states, including Nevada, Utah, and Georgia, exclusively use paperless Direct Recording Electronic Voting Machines (DREs), meaning only the paper absentee ballots require optical scanning. But some states—absentee ballots aside—are entirely paper and paper trail free.

Some states using DREs also use Voter Verified Paper Audit Trail Printers (VVPATs), which provide physical “receipts” of cast ballots. However, voters in 14 states will use DREs without paper copies of their vote—a troubling fact for those concerned with election fraud, since there would be no way to audit the results if the data was lost. Nevada and Utah, for example, exclusively use DREs without VVPATs. Florida is one of those 14 states with some paper-trail-free precincts. In 2006, Democrat Christine Jennings lost the race for the 13th Congressional District by just 369 votes. She claimed that 18,000 votes went uncounted, but without a paper trail, had no recourse. The courts ultimately upheld her loss to Republican Vern Buchanan.

In precincts using paper ballots—i.e., two-thirds of the country—ballots and the electronic tally they leave behind are not counted at polling places, but are instead moved to a centralized location (or many locations, depending on where you live). Before they’re transported, poll workers shut down the machines, but not before manually checking a few things. In Atlanta, for example, the machines are checked to make sure the count matches the number of paper certificates voters filled out before voting and the electronic database of voters created using the yellow swipe cards issued to each voter.

The process of getting the results to the centralized tabulation centers varies across the country. Some poll workers, in teams of two, deliver memory cards from the voting machines by simply driving them there. This makes traffic and traffic accidents a concern, especially in dense metropolitan areas. The couple making the delivery is typically bipartisan to keep things on-the-level. Besides the memory cards, the teams also deliver paper ballots, when applicable. For absentee ballots, the optical scanning is done on-site by teams of volunteers, a tedious process that sometimes lasts until 2:00 a.m.

Not every precinct relies on volunteer teams to deliver the ballots and memory cards to county election offices and tabulation centers. In Los Angeles County, they’re delivered via sheriff’s helicopter and patrol car. There’s a good reason for the extra security and expediency: the county has to count around 3 million ballots from 4,500 polling locations across 4,000-square miles. The ballots and cards don’t go straight from the polling places to be counted, either: they head to 70 “check-in centers” first, before the sheriff’s department takes over.

If you’re looking to buck the system and write in the name of your preferred candidate, you better make sure it’s even allowed. In 34 states, a write-in candidate has to fill out paperwork declaring their wish to be written-in, meaning a vote for Seymour Butts is a total throwaway unless Mr. Butts took care of business beforehand. In some states, write-in votes don’t even count, meaning you’re just wasting your time. It’s also a waste of time to write-in a candidate for vice president as your presidential pick, as some threatened to do with Mike Pence in 2016.

It doesn’t necessarily mean they can’t be hacked, but all voting machines in the US have an additional layer of security because they aren’t connected to the Internet. All tabulation is done off-network, meaning the final vote count is far less susceptible to cyberattacks. Voter registration systems, however, are vulnerable, but polling places are required to have paper copies of the elector’s list, so there’s a back-up in place. Even if voter registration was successfully compromised, provisional ballots allow voters to cast their ballots and sort out their registration woes at a later date.

It may feel like it the morning after an election—most elections, at least—but the results actually aren’t official until each state has undergone a process called a canvass. Procedures vary state-to-state, but the idea is make sure each and every vote has been accounted for, including absentee ballots, provisional ballots, challenged ballots, and ballots cast by members of the military overseas. The process can take weeks, but typically isn’t a hindrance to a losing candidate conceding and everyone getting on with their lives (the 2000 election being a notorious exception). The canvass is particularly important because it allows time for processing provisional ballots, which might be a voter’s only hope if their legitimacy as a voter is wrongly contested at the polling place.

To catch programming errors or voting machine malfunctions, all but 17 states have what’s called a post-election audit (PEA) after the polls close. Most of these audits involve hand-counting the ballots of a small percentage of the overall votes and comparing the results to what the machine said. The law requires poll workers to run an audit even if the race isn’t close. Some election officials aren’t big fans of these audits because they’re time-consuming and taxing on volunteers. Kathy Scheele, past president of the National Association of State Election Directors, says the PEAs are the “toughest thing” to recruit volunteers to do, and “all the audits do is show that the tabulators are damned accurate.”

Even candidates critical or dismissive of the press on the campaign trail rely heavily on them on election night. We’re not talking about CNN, FOX, ABC, NBC, CBS, et al., either—the Associated Press and its army of 4,000+ “stringers” are actually how the world learns about the results of a presidential election. As soon as polls close, these reporters on the ground phone in the raw data as the counties report it. More than 800 clerks answer those calls and enter the data throughout the night, which is ultimately how it appears over Wolf Blitzer’s shoulder. Some political analysts worry more, in fact, about the AP being hacked than they do about the actual election results. It’s far easier for a hacker to interfere with the reporting of votes than it is the casting of votes, which could cause mass confusion. Even in this worst-case scenario, thanks to the post-election canvass process, official results would emerge weeks later to set the record straight.