Ballots are due Nov. 5. The process for collecting and counting them involves multiple steps and many people.
Jenny Kane / AP
Editor’s note: Election Day is Tuesday, Nov. 5. Stay informed with OPB on the presidential race, key congressional battles and other local contests and ballot measures in Oregon and Southwest Washington at opb.org/elections.
People across Oregon are filling out their ballots ahead of this week’s highly-anticipated election.
In all, about 38% of Oregon’s registered voters have turned in their ballots, which remains below the pace of voting in the last two presidential election years, according to Oregon Elections Division data published Thursday. About 51% of the state’s registered Republicans have turned in their ballots compared to 46% of Democrats and 22% of non affiliated voters.
What happens next? Here’s how ballots are counted in Oregon, as explained by the Oregon Secretary of State.
Related: What you need to know about voting in Oregon and Southwest Washington
Like several other states, elections in Oregon are conducted by mail. Voters have until 8 p.m. on Nov. 5 to postmark or return their ballots in-person to a local elections office or an official drop box.
Authorized elections staff or deputized staff — such as law enforcement — pick up the ballots from drop boxes and then transport them to an elections office per the county’s individual security plan, which has been approved by the Secretary of State.
Officials review the ballots while they’re still in the envelopes to ensure they’re only keeping ballots for that specific county.
Authorized elections staff scan each ballot’s individual barcode and enter it into a centralized system to make sure each voter only submits one ballot. Staff also check the signatures on the ballot against a database that holds voter registration information to make sure the voter is who they say they are.
Related: Issues important to Oregon voters
If the signature doesn’t match the information in the database, the ballot is set aside for another review. If there’s still doubt after that — or if there is no signature — elections staff notify the voter, who has the opportunity to visit the clerk’s office to confirm their identity.
Once verified, ballots are sorted into batches of 100 and staff open the envelopes before the ballots are tabulated via a machine. The staff who do this must sign oaths, work on bipartisan teams and cannot be a relative or a member of a candidate’s household.
The teams remove the ballots from the return envelopes, and then a staff member runs the ballots through a scanner. This scanner is tested before, during and after the election. The test can be observed by the public.
Related: Listen to 'OPB Politics Now'
A supervisor at the county elections office then checks to make sure the ballots were scanned correctly. The scanner might reject a ballot if it can’t read the votes, perhaps if it is smudged, damaged by weather or if the voter circled a bubble but didn’t fill it in. If possible, staff will try to make sure the vote is counted and accurately reflects what the voter intended.
Votes are only counted by hand in certain circumstances, such as if a machine goes down, or if staff are conducting a post-election audit.
Once the ballots have all been counted, county clerks upload the ballot information onto the Secretary of State results website.
After the election, each county chooses a sample of ballots and counts them by hand to make sure the machine’s count is accurate. Staff seal the ballots and store them for two years after a federal election or, for other elections, 90 days after the last day to contest it.