BEAUFORT COUNTY, S.C. (WSAV) - Have you wondered where your ballot goes after sending it in? Beaufort County hosted a public test on the ballot sorting machines used in this year’s election to give voters a better understanding of how the machines work. The South Carolina Election Commission updated its ballot scanners for this year’s general election. The reasoning behind – safer and faster results. But many don’t know what the scanners do or how they process your vote. Vernon Kemp, Beaufort County I.T. election systems manager, sat down with WSAV to show the step-by-step process of running absentee ballots through the machine - starting at 9 AM on election day. “On that morning, they will start opening up the inner envelopes of the ballots. We have a team doing that and that while the ballots are being opened up, they’re sorting ballots and making sure that all the ballots are grouped into a certain number of batches, which is like 20 or whatever batch we need,” says Kemp. Once the ballots have been sorted, they will be placed onto the machine, which is called the DS 450. The Beaufort County Voter Registration and Elections office has two of them – which Kemp says, speeds up the process. “These tabulators can run up to... the max is up to about 150 ballots per minute,” says Kemp. Though it sounds and looks like a complicated machine, it's quite simple. Once the ballots are removed from the secured outer envelope and placed onto the seat (top tray), the scanning process starts. “The ballots are divided into three trays,” says Kemp. The machine will scan and sort each ballot into their different levels. The first level is rejected ballots, whether they’re unmarked, overmarked, or damaged. The second is write-ins, meaning any ballot that has a write-in name. The bottom tray is for every other ballot. With the rejected tray, if the ballot is damaged through mail transit, they may have to use a scanner, or a duplication station, to re-bubble the ballot. With a witness beside him reading out the contests, Kemp will go through and reselect all voting choices and then print a new undamaged ballot. “If we have to duplicate them, we can duplicate those ballots, because sometimes they're printed on eight and a half by eleven. If they do have the regular ballot, we run them through the scanner.” After the DS-450 scans all the ballots and divvies them into their different trays, Kemp says he will take those ballots out of the bin, rubber band them, and then store them in an open ballot box. Once they have finished running all ballots for the evening, they will seal the ballot box and put it in a secure place. Other than explaining how the machine works, Kemp also answered some questions on if the DS-450’s use any type of internet. “Are our election equipment connected to any type of Wi-Fi, internet device, or connected to the internet? Do we have any type of device that they’re connected to, or do they talk to each other, do they sync?  The answer is no. In South Carolina, all of our election equipment is offline.” Meaning your vote will not be interfered with. Kemp says, that even with issues that may arise, like a power outage or severe weather, they already have a plan in place to make sure every vote is counted. “If we have any technical issues with our equipment, especially our DS-450’s, I have an abundance of these DS 300 scanners that we can lock in our program and ready to go to be set up to run ballots through.”