Washoe County is already processing mail ballots after sending them to voters last week. This is ahead of early voting, which begins Saturday.
Processing is just that: an extensive process to make sure votes are recorded properly. First, a ballot is run through a mail ballot sorter and an automatic signature verification. That’s where things get a little bit tricky.
“If that matches, great. If it doesn't match, it goes to manual signature verification,” said George Guthrie, Public Information Officer for the Washoe County Registrar of Voters Office. “From there, those accepted ballots get batched. They get extracted. Those ballots are removed from the envelope, and then those ballots within scanned into our election management system.”
Once a ballot is scanned into that management system, the votes are counted toward the proper candidates, just like during in-person voting. The county ensures that the workers in the processing center are vetted before they are able to touch the ballots and make elections as secure as possible, and get votes counted as quickly as possible.
“We don't take members of the public to come in and work in our back processing room. They are employees of the county,” said Guthrie. “So they go through that background process of becoming an employee. We have an amazing process where we implore our county workers to come work for us. They get the benefit of that, and we get the benefit of having these trusted individuals in our central counting place.”
The Washoe County Registrar of Voters Office actually hosts a live stream of the processing center while it's operating -- so you can watch the process as it unfolds. That can be found here.
More information on early voting can be found here.
