Early votes late in Elkhart County
Nov. 7—GOSHEN — Noontime on Thursday, early voting ballots in Elkhart County were still being counted.
Elkhart County First Deputy Clark Carol Smith said that while all vote center ballots are finally in, a harrowing nearly 30,000 mail-in and early voting ballots began being counted by hand Wednesday morning, and as of midday Thursday, there were still around 6,000 left to go.
"It's kind of a guess a little bit," Smith admitted, explaining that she estimates how many ballots are left to count based on the number of tabs — containing 1,400 ballots each — they have left to open and run through the voting machine between mail-in and in-person early voting. Around 15,000 early-in person votes have been scanned in.
"Normally early voting, we open it election day and we tabulate it, we start around 4, running the tabulator," Smith said. "I started it. I was like, I don't know, 300 ballots in, when my machine went down. I had to wait for a tech, plus the problem was we did not have enough workers at election central to open the quantity of envelopes that we have. When you're talking 30,000 envelopes, it takes quite a while."
Unlike election day ballots, where voters can make their selections and run them through the in-person tabulator, which submits the information to the installed encrypted USB drive, which is then taken to election headquarters at the Elkhart County Administration Building to have its information pulled and added to the rest of the votes, early votes must be placed individually into an envelope. This means that each individual envelope must be opened, the ballot unfolded, and manually scanned into the tabulator like voters in person do on election day.
"I'm not saying it's bad to vote early," Smith said. "It is an option. I'm just saying it changes dynamics for us and the way we handle product. ... The difference between election day and early voting is there's no envelope. The ballot goes straight into the tabulator. You don't have to do that handling of all that."
Election day votes also featured unique circumstances. Smith said Elkhart County Clerk Chris Anderson is now in the process of entering the election day votes from the 29 vote centers, which were all in midday Wednesday, to the state.
A technical difficulty with one of the encrypted USB drives that holds the vote tallies at one of the vote centers left them unable to submit all 29 vote centers in Elkhart County Tuesday night.
"You have to close the poll in order for the stick to be ready to upload the data," Smith explained. "What happened was they had pulled it, which doesn't risk any of the data or anything, but I can't enter the results in that state, so I had to put it back in (a tabulator) ... I have to close out of the poll first and then the stick will be a readable mode."
But all the tabulators from the vote centers had previous information from the votes that day currently on them.
"I had to put it in one that had no ballots on it," Smith explained. "We didn't do it election night because all the (tabulators) that were here, we had been feeding ballots so (they) had counts, and we waited until the next day and closed out (a) poll so that we could tabulate."
She installed the USB into the cleared tabulator, closed out the program, and from there uploading to the main tabulator containing all the results was a simple process.
"It's not anything that we can say, 'Well, holy moley, this went wrong,'" Smith said. "Bigger turnout for early voting, ran out of the proper envelopes, couldn't get what we needed, had to downsize which meant folding the ballots, which just made it more time consuming to open. ... It was just a storyline of events, but we had the same issue in 2020. It took I think four days to finish."
Help is still needed to finish getting the votes in. Mail-in and early voting ballots must be opened from the envelopes before they can be scanned. Opening ballots requires individuals be oathed in, sign an ordinance agreement, and they cannot have recent criminal background or election convictions, but are not required to be registered voters.
If any of the ballots need to be remade due to damage, a Republican and Democrat representative must be on site.
