Over the past several weeks, the Cumberland County elections staff and the five members of the Cumberland County Board of Elections have taken in nearly 3,300 absentee ballots.
It’s a laborious task that runs hours and hours as each ballot is processed by hand by the three Democrats and two Republicans appointed to oversee the elections.
It involves slicing open the ballot envelopes. Slicing machines help with this, but the machines sometimes slice into the ballot itself. Sliced ballots are still counted.
The board members verify whether each voter enclosed a copy of a photo ID. At least two voters mailed their actual IDs instead of a photocopy. Another voter sent a photocopy of their ID, but their name was partly cut off at the edge of the paper.
Board members verify whether the voters’ ballot paperwork is correctly filled out. They remove each ballot so it can be counted, and then they or a staff member put each ballot into a tabulator machine, one by one.
While the machine counts the votes, the staff and board — by law — do not retrieve the vote totals from it, Elections Board Chair Irene Grimes told CityView. They only keep track of how many ballots it scans, she said. The vote counts will not be collected until Election Day.
If a voter didn’t send a copy of an ID, the process further involves evaluating the form the voter fills out to explain why not. The voter ID law allows for exceptions, such as lack of access to a copy machine, or their ID had been lost or stolen.
As the board members examine the ballots, they sometimes see other issues. Some they can resolve, some they cannot. Some ballots evidently got wet. One voter circled their choices instead of filling in the bubbles next to the candidate’s names — and then wrote in the candidate’s name after circling it.
Another voter wrote in Jesus Christ as their choice for president. It led to some chuckling among the board.
Tuesday’s Board of Elections meeting ran nearly three hours and 40 minutes before the board decided to take a break until 9 a.m. Wednesday. The staff and board members had handled about 900 ballots.
Why couldn’t the board finish on Tuesday?
Because somewhere along the way that morning, the count of how many ballots the elections office received and the board handled was one more than the ballot total listed on the ballot tabulation machine, Grimes said.
The board members and staff went through their paperwork and ballots to try to resolve the discrepancy. They could not figure out what went wrong. Grimes said.
So at 9 a.m. Wednesday morning at the Board of Elections office, all previously handled absentee ballots are going to be run through a massive vote tabulator machine that can scan 800 ballots per minute, Grimes said.
The machine will count how many ballots it processes, she said. She is hopeful the count will total 3,285, matching the number of ballots that the office has received.
People who would like to observe the process can visit the county elections office. It’s on the ground floor of the county office building at 227 Fountainhead Lane.
Senior reporter Paul Woolverton can be reached at 910-261-4710 and pwoolverton@cityviewnc.com.
Did you find this story useful or interesting? It was made possible by donations from readers like you to the CityView News Fund, a 501(c)(3) charitable organization committed to an informed democracy in Fayetteville and Cumberland County.
Please consider making a tax-deductible donation so CityView can bring you more news and information like this.
