MDN.ORG:
Missouri Digital News
MDN.ORG
Mo. Digital News
Missouri Digital News
MDN.ORG:
Mo. Digital News
MDN.ORG:
Missouri Digital News
MDN.ORG:
Missouri Digital News
MDN.ORG
Mo. Digital News
Missouri Digital News
MDN.ORG:
Mo. Digital News
MDN.ORG:
Missouri Digital News
JEFFERSON CITY - From the ballot box to the election returns on the evening news, the responsibility of counting each Missourian's vote will fall upon the state's 114 county clerk offices and the office of the Secretary of State.
The actual counting of individual votes is done on the county level.
Ballots are collected from the individual polling places and brought to a central location within the county, usually the county court house.
With a third of Missouri voting districts using punch card ballots, the same ballot that gave a name to the infamous "hanging chad," some counties employ chad teams to look over the ballots.
In Cole County, vote counting goes through a three-step process. First the ballots go through a receiving team to verify when and where the ballots came from. They are then passed on to the chad team. After being checked for any inconsistent chads, the ballots are sent to the counting room where they are counted in a punch card tabulator.
Other Missouri voting districts use the optical scan ballot on which votes are bubbled in with pencil.
After voting officials have counted all the votes in their counties they are called in by telephone to the Secretary of State's office.
"It's not a case of counting votes," said Gayla Vandelicht, director of elections at the Secretary of State's office. "It's simply a case of adding the totals together."
The Secretary of State's office synthesizes all the votes from the counties and posts the results on their website.
But the votes that are reported on election night are unoffical until certified by voting authorities on the local and state levels.
Each Missouri county has two weeks from election day or until November 16 to certify their votes.
"That gives them ample time, for one thing, to check the provisional votes," said Vandelicht. "They have two weeks to check and see whether or not those people were qualified to vote."
Provisional votes are usually cast by people using absentee ballots.
"Normally what we'll do is have a certification team that comes back in on thursday morning," said Marvin Register. "They will go through two or three of those precincts, they will count the ballots completely."
Often it is merely a process of comparing the number of ballots distributed to the number voters.
"We do an audit check, a thorough internal audit check," said James O'Keefe, St. Louis City election director. "What we try to do is zero out the elections and make sure the number of ballots cast equal the number of ballots given."
After election results are certified on the county level, the state has two weeks for it's own certification process.
"We convene the state board of canvassers," said Vandelicht. "A canvasser is someone who comes in and has the right to look at the results that the counties have sent in."
All the returns from the counties are made available to the canvassers.
"They can check the results and make sure that we have tabulated the results correctly," said Vandelicht.
After a four week process of certification, the winners of the election are officially announced.