Tracking your ballot ahead of the election

RENTON, Wash. — Presidential elections have increasingly come under scrutiny.

Ahead of the 2024 presidential election, KIRO 7′s Brandon Thompson took a look at each and every step your ballot goes through - from when you drop it off until it’s counted and stored.

The first step is getting the ballots into the building.

“What we’re doing here is the team are bringing bins of ballots back,” said Julie Wise, King County Election Director. “They’re getting fuller and fuller closer to election day.”

Teams of two unload the ballot boxes, securing them with unique numbered tabs.

It’s about the chain of custody, as the ballots next get sent through a machine verifying voter status and taking stock of voter’s signatures.

According to Director Julie Wise, the staff is trained by the Washington State Patrol to be able to verify and compare signatures.

Ballots are removed from the envelope and the security sleeve and sent through the machine.

“It provides a level of secrecy to their ballot and to their vote,” said Wise.

Laying out ballots in groups of 250, finally, they’re ready to be counted.

“Now we’re not counting actual votes, right? We can’t do that until 8 p.m. on election night, but we can do all these other processes and steps leading up to that,” said Wise.

The computers and machines that tally the votes are not, and never will be, connected to the internet. The results travel via ethernet cord to a server room that only five people have access to.

“As the Director of Elections, I am not even one of them,” adds Wise.

The results are stored there and only revealed after 8 p.m. on election night.

“Staff will physically go in there after 8 p.m., get the results, and bring them to a computer that is actually on the network and post the results to the website,” Wise explains.

These are the results we’ll all be waiting to see come Tuesday night.

The ballots aren’t entirely done after that, they’re stored for nearly two years, or whenever lawsuits are finished. The 2020 ballots were held onto until earlier this year.

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