We know. At 8:05 p.m. on Election Night, you will be looking for unofficial election results. You’ll be looking on our Web site, Shape the Future, or you’ll have the TV remote in hand and be channel surfing. You’ll want to know outcomes. And we’ll have them.
How’s that possible? It’s possible because we start processing voted Vote by Mail ballots seven working days before the election, which is today. PROCESSING. Not counting. We do not count a single vote before 8:00 p.m. We get everything ready to count. That’s called processing.
Thanks to the new thirty-eight foot long, 3,700 pound Pitney Bowes Relia-Vote machine that can process up to 24,000 ballots per hour, we are going to do this job lightening fast compared to prior elections. But it takes nearly seven passes through the machine, plus human intervention on each ballot, to get the job done.
So it’s not quite that fast. But compared to before, it’s a marvel. Observers are welcome to see this process taking place. We have every hope that, at 8:05 p.m., anyone surfing online will have a good idea of which races are close and which races are over.
