CLEVELAND — Once a ballot is cast in Ohio, there is a highly structured process to guarantee the safety and security of the election. Here is a behind-the-scenes look at what happens to your ballot once the polls close.
At 7:30 p.m., local election managers at polling places across the state announce to any crowds still gathered at the polling places that the polls are closed. Anyone who is still in line at the time will be allowed to vote.
As the bipartisan team of poll workers goes about closing up shop, boxing and sealing the election materials and equipment, the folks at the 88 county boards of elections can now hit tabulate and tally up all of the vote-by-mail and early in-person votes that have come in over the past four weeks, which tends to be a third or more of the total election votes cast, with those numbers released to the public around 8 p.m.
Then the heavy lifting begins — literally — as bipartisan teams of poll workers drive together to the warehouse with all of the key election materials, including the ballots, memory sticks, poll books and all the supplies used at the polling place. Everything is tagged, color-coded and most importantly, bar-coded.
“We put bar codes on everything. If there’s space for a barcode, we tag it. Like on these gray bags you’ll see there’s a bar code, and that bar code is telling us different things,” said Anthony Perlatti, Director of the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections. “So maybe the polling location, the precinct in which ballots should be in there from, so that’s what these guys would do here. They have their scanners, they’re going over, putting everything into a database so we can check to see what’s out, what’s back and then at the end of the night or throughout the process as we’re trying to reconcile, we can see what’s going on.”
Those materials are kept in secure areas, double-locked with the key cards of a Democrat and a Republican needed to open it. One card alone won’t do it.
“You have to have two people coming in,” Perlatti said.
In Ohio, there is a paper trail. The paper ballots are matched against the electronic totals over the next three weeks.
“When we count the hard copy paper and we compare it to that electronic tabulation, we put them side by side, we’ve routinely had an accuracy above 99%,” Secretary of State Frank LaRose said. “In fact, 99.98% was the accuracy rate for 2020. I anticipate that we’ll have something similar three weeks from now when we audit this election.”
That's an important point. The election day results released Tuesday night into the early morning hours tomorrow are unofficial. We won't see any updates for three weeks.
That's so they can count all of the absentee and overseas ballots that have ten days to come in, provided they have a postmark of November 7 or earlier, as well as the tens of thousands of provisional ballots.
Four years ago in Cuyahoga County, there were more than 11,000 provisional ballots.
Recounts come into play in three weeks when we have all the votes counted and they're triggered automatically when a local race is decided by half a percentage point or less and a statewide race is decided by a quarter percent or less.
In the last two years, 31 local races in the state ended in a tie, so we are likely to see some recounts.
Download the News 5 Cleveland app now for more stories from us, plus alerts on major news, the latest weather forecast, traffic information and much more. Download now on your Apple device here, and your Android device here.
You can also catch News 5 Cleveland on Roku, Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV, YouTube TV, DIRECTV NOW, Hulu Live and more. We're also on Amazon Alexa devices. Learn more about our streaming options here.
