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What Happens When the Polls Close? See How Votes Are Counted

By Patty Wetli | March 16, 2016 9:50am | Updated on November 8, 2016 8:25am
 When the polls close, election judges get down to the business of counting and securing votes. See how. 

  
How Votes Get Counted
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LINCOLN SQUARE — Ever wondered how votes get counted?

So did we.

During last spring's primary elections, we followed the tallying process at Sulzer Library, 4455 N. Lincoln Ave., which served as the polling place for the 22nd and 45th precincts in the 47th Ward.

Here's how it works.

First step: the ballot count

Volunteer Ethan Moskal was given the task of counting the unused ballots, which would be added to the number of ballots cast as well as the number of "spoiled" ballots (ripped, incorrectly marked, etc.). The total would need to match the number of ballots on hand at the beginning of the day.

Ethan Moskal packs up a ballot station, which folds into a suitcase.

Step two: secure the ballots

Sara Carlson, a volunteer who's been working elections for more than a decade, opened the ballot box — where ballots land once voters feed them into the tallying machine.

The ballots were placed into a plastic bag, which was then sealed with tamper-proof tape. Next, the bag was zipped into a "transfer" box for transport to a "receiving station." There are 25 receiving stations in Chicago — one station serves two wards — which serve as collection hubs for precinct-level data.

Ballot bags are only opened in the event a recount is needed, according to Jack Lydon, a poll watcher and former 47th Ward committeeman.

Paper ballots are sealed and transported to a "receiving station." [All photos DNAinfo/Patty Wetli]

Step three: count the votes

Long gone are the days when poll workers manually counted votes.

Today, ballots are tallied electronically. Both the touch-screen voting machines and the paper ballot readers churn out total vote counts on paper tapes that look much like cash register receipts.

Though results provide a snapshot of just hundreds of voters, precinct-level tallies are a "good indication of what the ward will do," Lydon said.

These tapes are then sealed in an envelope.

Step four: transmit the voting data

So how are vote totals available so quickly?

The paper reader's information is stored in a data pack and the touch-screen votes are stored in a USB memory stick. Both are hooked up to a cellular transmitter that merges votes from the two machines and sends the precinct total to election central, where the results are tallied city-wide.

The ballot reader (atop the ballot box) spits out a paper tape of vote tallies. The reader's data pack is attached to a transmitter, and the votes are sent to election central.

If there's going to be a glitch in the process, data transmission is a likely point of failure. At Sulzer, the 45th precinct cell receiver was on the fritz during our observation and was unable to transmit or print a merged vote total.

The data pack was taken to the receiving station — Coonley Elementary, in the case of the 47th Ward — where it could be read by a different transmitter.

An hour after the polls closed, the election judges were still dotting i's and crossing t's — well into the 14th hour of a day that started before 6 a.m.

"You see your neighbors, you feel part of the community," said Carlson. "I appreciate being part of the democratic process."

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