This story was produced as part of the Colorado Capitol News Alliance. It first appeared at rmpbs.org.
So you’ve mailed or dropped off your ballot or maybe even voted in real life at a voting center.
What happens next?
The process is a set of careful steps, designed to keep your vote confidential and accurately tracking ballots all along the way. Some of the work is done by hand, but much is done by machine. In Colorado, only San Juan County, with 723 active voters, counts votes entirely by hand.
Counties could start processing ballots as early as June 15, allowing them to get ahead of the game before the last-minute deluge of voting on June 30. But none of the results are available to anyone until polls close at 7 p.m. June 30.
The Workers
Ten vote-counting workers streamed into the Morgan County Courthouse in Fort Morgan the Thursday before primary day, still talking about the hail, rain and lightning storm the night before. Pat Garber told the other women about peering through a broken car windshield on her drive there.
Each person used their ID to scan into the vote counting room as a pot of coffee brewed. County Clerk Kevin Strauch fired up the computer systems, which needed to be restarted after the storm.
Part-time election workers supplement county staff in most counties. They apply, go through background checks and are typically paid an hourly wage that varies by county, from $12 in Weld County to more than $20 in some metro area counties.
People work in cross-political party pairs, each pair composed of people from different parties. Morgan County has 10 people working during the primary but will have 40 during November’s general election.
Garber, a Democrat, started working elections when she was a clerk for Log Lane Village and ran elections there. She worked in county elections when her husband, Clifford Garber, served as county clerk in the 1970s. After retiring from Western Sugar Cooperative, she returned to the seasonal job.
She’s seen plenty of changes, from using ledger books to using computers.
“This system, it's a lot less work for us,” she said. “But both ways, I think the people who worked were really conscientious about what we're doing, and so it was very safe and honest.”
While Garber and others have red Rs or blue Ds on their badges, signs on the walls warn against talking about politics.
“We are Democrats and Republicans,” Garber said. “But we're friends here. There's absolutely no politics.”
The Process
Once or twice a day — and more often on Election Day — the pairs pick up ballots from drop boxes and vote centers around the county. They count and group the ballots by party, initialling the numbers on the packet.
The unprocessed ballots are then locked in a Diebold safe in the courthouse until workers are ready to process them.
Thursday morning, Strauch opened the safe and took out a basket of grouped ballots for two workers preparing to verify voter signatures on the envelopes. The two counted the number of ballots in each package to make sure they contained the correct number, then initialled the packet.
Each woman took a packet to a computer and called up the voter information on the back of the envelope in the state’s vote system to compare the signature to past versions for that voter. Larger counties run the ballots through scanning machines for the initial round of signature verification, with those rejected reviewed by election judges.
If a signature is questioned, two other people, each from a different party, review it, Strauch said. If they also question the signature, that ballot doesn’t go to the counting room. Instead, the voter is notified of the issue and has an opportunity to verify their signatures up to eight days after the election.
Once signatures are verified, the ballots are regrouped (potentially with new numbers if signatures were rejected) and walked over to the counting room. A machine is used to slice open the envelopes.
There, six workers form two assembly lines of sorts. The first two workers each take a package of ballots, placing the signature side of the envelope face down, so they can’t see it. They take the ballot from the envelope, including the “secrecy sleeve” if it’s used, and hand it to the person next to them. That middle person removes the sleeve and opens the ballot and flattens it in a stack until the end of the batch is reached, counts are initialled and the batch is handed to a third worker.
The primary election requires some separate steps for unaffiliated voters. If a voter fills out both Republican and Democratic ballots, both are rejected. The ballots are placed back in the envelope, stamped “rejected,” initialed by both judges and placed in a basket of rejected ballots.
Sometimes, unaffiliated voters include both ballots, one filled out and one blank. The blank ballot is removed, a corner cut off and placed in a basket so it can’t be reused.
The second worker then tells the first which party the ballot is for. Because Colorado tracks which party unaffiliated voters selected, the first worker marks the envelope with a red or blue bingo stamper (again, without looking at the identity of the voter). Those envelopes go back to the signature verification team, which will enter the party selection for unaffiliated voters in the state computer system.
The third worker at the table stacks ballots into groups of 60 and places them in folders. The ballots from different batches are alternated.
“When we count them, we don’t keep them in the order we got them,” Garber said, noting that makes it impossible to coordinate a ballot with an envelope. “No trails.”
One of the ballots that morning has marks in the margins, which will prevent it from being read by the scanner. So the first two workers create a duplicate ballot, fill it out and complete paperwork about the duplicated ballot, which is also preserved.
Some ballots that require duplication may have food or beverage spills, or excessive writing. The workers laugh about a past ballot with “Hay for sale” written on the back. The ballot didn’t include any contact information, however, so no hay could be bought.
The ballots are then scanned, and each is imprinted with a unique ID. Once processed, the ballots are placed back in the folder. The unique IDs are added to the details about the ballots on the folder and, again, initialed by the workers.
Then the folder is placed in one of a series of metal boxes, which are kept sealed when not in use.
Votes that can’t be read are identified in the computer system for adjudication, as happened with one ballot on Thursday morning. The first two judges examined it on the computer to determine what the voter meant. In this instance, the voter filled in both bubbles in the contest for Republican attorney general, but then crossed out one of the names. The judges corrected the vote in the computer system.
The security and voter confidence
Video cameras are everywhere throughout the process. Surrounding ballot drop boxes. In the signature verification room. In the counting room. In the vote centers at the courthouse, the Wiggins Fire Hall and the Brush Fairgrounds.
Closed circuit TV screens in the clerk’s office show multi-views of the cameras, and recordings may be reviewed. Some counties even livestream the drop box videos, though Morgan County doesn’t have the resources to do that.
Strauch does put the processed ballots online after the election is certified, people can examine them themselves. Strauch worked for the Adams County elections staff before winning the 2022 GOP primary to become Morgan County clerk. He was appointed to the job in August that year after the retirement of the previous clerk.
This year, Strauch conducted a Ballot University to walk Morgan County residents through the process and show them how it works. He still has to fight election questioning that’s plagued county clerks since President Donald Trump began spreading falsehoods about mail balloting even before the 2020 election. For instance, Morgan County is among several counties that use different colors on envelopes to make sorting easier, especially for unaffiliated voters.
He said he’s also been trying to encourage voters to participate in the primary election.
“We're usually bottom 10 in the state in turnout for Morgan County. So we've been doing a whole program of trying to try and get voter turnout up.”
Through Thursday, just over 3,000 ballots of the county’s 18,479 active voters had participated. That’s slightly ahead of turnout in 2022.
Note: Sandra Fish began working as an election judge with the Denver Elections Division on Friday.
