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.

To put this in perspective, five years ago, 5,000 votes were cast by mail. Today, more than 140,000 voters have signed up to Vote by Mail, and mechanical intervention was needed to get the job done. Remember, 50 percent of the turnout in this November’s Election is likely to be cast by those who Vote by Mail.

But there is a catch.

Not all the votes will be counted Election Night. If a voted Vote by Mail ballot was dropped off on Election Day at the Elections Office on Tower Road or any polling place in the county, those votes won’t be included in the unofficial election results reported on Election Night. They will be added during the vote totalling in the days that follow and incorporated into the Official Election Results that are certified by our Chief Elections Officer, Warren Slocum, and accepted by the San Mateo County Board of Supervisors 28 days after the election.

A complete summary of every vote cast is published in the Statement of the Vote, a several hundred page document that resembles a phone book and is published on the California Secretary of State’s Web site following certification.

That one’s especially for all you election aficionados.