Editor’s note: Get live updates from the election here. We will also have results once polls close here.
After the polls close Tuesday night, Cuyahoga County Board of Elections staff will tally hundreds of thousands of votes that will help decide Ohio’s closely watched gubernatorial and U.S. Senate races.
The board recently opened the doors of its Cleveland warehouse to show how that work happens. Here is a guide to how your ballot becomes part of Ohio’s vote total.
Scanners record paper ballot data onto memory sticks
Cuyahoga County voters mark their choice on paper ballots. If you vote in person at your local polling place on Election Day, you’ll feed that completed ballot into a scanning machine.
The scanners save vote data and ballot images onto memory sticks. At the end of the night, poll workers place those sticks into pouches that they zip and seal.
Each machine contains a second stick that serves as a backup, creating a “permanent record” of the votes cast, board Deputy Director Tony Kaloger said. That one stays in the machine.
Workers take the memory sticks, ballots and other election equipment to a drop-off location. There, the sticks are counted, and workers take the supplies by van to the board’s warehouse, he said.
At the warehouse, bipartisan pairs of workers take those memory sticks to the tabulation room, where the votes are tallied. The ballots go into a cage that is secured with two locks. Democratic staffers have the combination for one lock and Republicans have the code for the other.
“This has cameras on it 24/7,” Kaloger said of the ballot cage, adding that a sheriff’s deputy is on hand on Election Night.
Democratic and Republican keys needed for tabulation room
There are two key pads on the wall outside the tabulation room: one for Democratic workers and one for Republicans. Staffers from both parties need to swipe their key cards to unlock the door.
Inside the tabulation room, workers scan bar codes on each memory stick pouch and make sure all the memory sticks are accounted for, Kaloger said.
Staff use the memory sticks to upload the results to the board’s tabulation server. The computers are not connected to the web.
“None of this stuff is tied to the internet,” Kaloger said. “By law, it cannot be tied to the internet, so there’s no way for somebody to hack something that’s not connected.”
Each half hour, the board uses a separate set of memory sticks to transfer results from the tabulation server to a computer connected to the internet. The Ohio Secretary of State’s Office provides those sticks, which are made in the U.S., Kaloger said.
Board staff discard each stick in a bin afterward and don’t use it again. That way, there’s no chance that malware could ride on the memory stick back onto the server that contains election results.
“When it’s time to do the next upload, we take another fresh stick that has never been used,” Kaloger said.
To make sure they’ve tabulated the correct number of ballots in each precinct, election workers turn to the board’s electronic poll books. These are the tablets that voters use to check in when they arrive at their polling places.
Workers compare the number of ballots they’ve tabulated to the number of voters who checked in, according to Brian Cleary, who manages the ballot services division.
“If they don’t match, we try to figure out why,” he said.
That could mean taking out the paper ballots from that precinct and scanning them again.
It can take time for workers to break down polling locations and bring memory sticks, ballots and other gear back to the board’s warehouse. The first vans might not arrive until around 9 p.m. or 9:30 p.m., Kaloger said. Workers keep an electronic running list to make sure that nothing is lost, according to Cleary.
“Everything has its checks and balances,” Kaloger said. “We would love to get out of here by 11:30 or whatever, but here’s what we want more: We want to be correct.”
What about the early votes?
In Ohio, mail-in and early-in-person ballots are scanned as they come in. But those results aren’t added up on the tabulation server until after the polls close on Election Night.
Kaloger compared it to entering numbers into a calculator but waiting until 7:30 p.m. on Election Night to hit the equals sign.
“Nobody knows who’s ahead or what the results are until after 7:30 on Election Night,” he said.
Typically, the early votes are the first results posted online after the polls close.
Board uses paper ballots for recounts and audits
If a candidate or issue wins by half a percentage point or less, Ohio law requires a recount. The board will use the paper ballots to count the votes again. (The recount margin for statewide elections is 0.25%.)
Ohio boards double-check their work through what’s known as the post-election audit. The secretary of state will pick two races, and the boards will randomly pick a local one. Then the boards recount a sample of the votes.
If there’s a tight margin of victory in a race, the Cuyahoga County board will select a large vote sample to recount, Cleary said. If the margin is bigger, the board will pick a smaller sample. The goal is to check for any mistakes in the original vote count.
Audits of the 2024 election results found a 99.99% accuracy rate statewide, according to the secretary of state.
Official vs. unofficial results
The unofficial results posted on Election Night often tell us who won a given race. But in very close contests, provisional ballots could be decisive.
Voters cast provisional ballots if there’s some question about their eligibility. Perhaps they didn’t update their address in time or didn’t have valid identification. After Election Day, board staff verify that those provisional ballots were indeed cast by eligible voters.
In the weeks after the election, boards will prepare an official count that includes valid provisional votes. This year, election boards have until Nov. 24 to conduct the official canvass of results.
After that, races with thin enough margins will head to recounts.
