As they count absentee ballots, some context: I spent 6.5 hours in my county helping with absentee ballots. We had between 2800-3000 in our county alone. The team of 10-15 started at 8AM. I got there at 12:30PM. We got the prep work done and started opening ballots at 3PM.

We had to open the envelope and flatten the ballot for the machine to read it. I lost count but when I did I had opened 232 ballots. We started at 3PM and with 10-15 people opening ballots we finished OPENING at 6PM. Then spent 30 minutes feeding stacks into the machine.

When I left the election commissioners and officials were fixing the absentee ballots that the machine couldn’t read by filling out new ballots.

Out of all ballots I opened I only destroyed one: I sliced it in half because of the way it was folded in the envelope. It got fixed!

I’m sharing this for people stressed out about the wait: if it took 10-15 people working for 10-13 hours just to to OPEN 2800-3000 ballots to be counted, the people working with hundreds of thousands or millions of absentee ballots will need time, too.

Also, that it’s work is no joke: I’m only awake because my right arm woke me up, aching, due to the repetitive motion of opening envelopes and flattening ballots.

Being methodical and careful is good for both an accurate count and the health of the workers.

Reading the news about PA: people counting ballots doing “admin work”. I can unpack this a little because I have now counted ballots!

In Arkansas, ballots arrived in big envelopes with proof of ID and the ballot envelope. So we the team had to open those first.

Ballots without ID had to be set aside for additional processing. Then the ballot signature had to be compared with the absentee ballot requests signature. On paper. In giant binders.

Then once everything was open, the signature pages had to be filed away (this is what I worked on for two hours). The ballot envelopes had to be separated from any form of ID that might connect the ballot to a person and the IDs and stuff locked away.

A lot of people did this, actually. The way my county handled it was to immediately remove the ID from the sort and place it in a special location for further processing. I didn’t do any of this so don’t know the process. https://twitter.com/angiemaxwell1/status/1324386368961810438

I didn’t get to the annex until 12:30, so I missed most of the tedious signature checking and matching returned ballots with absentee ballot request forms. It was finishing when I got there. They started at 8:30AM. 2800-3000 ballots, 10-15 people...yeah.

And when I started opening ballots, the direction was: slow and careful is better than rushing. Take my time. And I did! I handled every ballot envelope and considered the best way to open it without damaging the ballot. Human hands can only move so fast.

So if PA has a million ballots to OPEN still, their admin work is probably uhhhh nothing compared to what I experienced. It’s massive. Cheer those people on, because they’re doing a really tough, sensitive job.

Another great thread along these lines!

Our machines would reject ballots with too many folds or ones that looked like they had gotten...wet???? So they would have to be processed by hand. It’s a thing! https://twitter.com/cpotterpgh/status/1324392412651933702