In Coalville, the Summit County Clerk’s Office continues the ballot count through Election Day as voters show up at the polls.Ballot counting storms the county clerk offices every election, making a small, quiet space into a hub of papers and people, filled with the constant shuffle of boxes and workers processing, verifying, and tabulating votes. The rooms are papered floor to ceiling with numbers, red checkmarks, and industrious workers. In Summit County, the Clerk’s Office is a beehive on Election Day, but the strict regiment of ballot counting remained. There are four rooms designated for election materials in Summit County Clerk Evelyn Furse’s office. The first is a dumping ground for incoming ballot batches, delivered by a pair of workers from each polling station directly to the office. In this room, the ballots are separated into boxes to remain secured until they are opened to be counted. Each batch is numbered and marked on the wall as they are opened and cleared. The ballots move into the neighboring room, where four certified workers verify each ballot, cross-referencing details with voters’ previous ballots and driver’s license signatures. For ballots that pass this screening, the tab that secures the voter’s signature is ripped off and set aside for audit. From here, the envelopes move to a large paper cutter, where the ballot is unsealed. Once the ballot is separated from the envelope, the voter’s anonymity is permanently established. From here, the ballots are unfolded by a team of six workers and fed into the tabulator to count votes. This data is then fed into a computer to be stored on memory drives. Neither the tabulator nor the computer have internet connection capabilities, and the memory drives ensure all the information is safely stored. Sarah Cylvick watches the process in the room where ballots are flattened out and then ran through the machine to be counted. Credit: Clayton Steward/Park RecordThese security measures may seem intense, but for local Summit County resident Sarah Cylvick, seeing this process of ballot counting clarified all of her concerns as a voter. “I needed to know what really happens to my ballot, see the process, and watch it progress through each step,” said Cylvick. This is her second year attending the count at Summit County. Last year, she came hoping to watch her own ballot come through the system. She had voted in person on Election Day, a process she said she enjoys for the excitement it brings as a community tradition. With delays in the counting process last year, Cylvick returned four days in a row before she was able to see a batch of the in-person ballots being processed. “It was just amazing to see how all the human hands involved in the process do a great job,” she said. She returned this year to do the same, but this time she voted early, hoping to watch her batch process on the day of the election. “It’s just such a remarkable system. They do a good job. They really do take it so seriously,” she said. The Clerk’s Office goes to lengths to verify the security of the count. Every room must have a member of the Clerk’s Office supervising each room, and all rooms are video-recorded and live-streamed to a public viewing area in the Summit County Administration Building. No individual may ever be alone with any ballots, including the workers who drive the batches between the polling centers and the Clerk’s Office.This multi-step, multi-hand process of counting ballots has been put in place to address voter concerns for the security, anonymity and inclusion of their ballot. For County Clerk Evelyn Furse, this kind of anonymity was a real worry for her as a voter. “It’s a great thing (to maintain voter anonymity). I know it was always my main concern as a voter,” said Furse. Summit County Clerk Eve Furse explains the cameras in the ballot processing rooms. Credit: Clayton Steward/Park RecordThe added layers of security and transparency across the county clerk offices are, however, a relatively new phenomenon. One of the biggest changes Furse has seen since the start of her term in 2021 is in ballot security. “Reconciliation used to be done to rough estimates. Now it is exact, and it must be done every single night,” said Furse. “It’s a lot of little things that make a big difference.” Reconciliation is the tracking of the number of ballots printed, used and unused within the election cycle, to ensure that every valid ballot cast was counted. Ensuring these security concerns are met is not the only challenge for Furse this election cycle. She works with a staff of four, including herself, at the county office. As there are four rooms of supervised work being done during every ballot-counting shift, every member of Furse’s staff must be present at all times. Adding more shifts of certified ballot counters is difficult when it requires the Clerk’s Office team to put in even more hours at the end of their day, she said. “Today, we all started at different locations to help set up polling stations around 6:15 a.m.,” said Furse. “With just four of us here, and being only recently down a person, it is a big challenge.” Every room ballots are processed in has a video live stream that is also recorded and can be viewed live in-person by the public. Credit: Clayton Steward/Park RecordThough voting has been streamlined with machine counting and tabulators, the individual people who verify each ballot work from dawn to dusk to ensure secure, efficient results in the election. Molly Orgill, a planner for Summit County, has been a volunteer in the ballot counting process since 2004. As a voter and counter, Orgill has seen the process through many iterations and is pleased with where the county is today. “Paper ballots are good. It’s really helpful to folks who can’t get out (on Election Day) to vote,” said Orgill. “Machine voting may have been a faster process for us, but nothing compares to the accuracy of the paper ballot system, even if it takes longer for us to do.” The Summit County Clerk’s Office will be open through Wednesday for ballot counting and is open to the public for viewing at all times. The post Counting ballots in Summit County: Election Day from dawn to dusk and beyond for Clerk’s Office appeared first on Park Record.