ALLEGHENY COUNTY, Pa. — Allegheny County election officials are preparing to accept, process and count hundreds of thousands of ballots.
“We want this to be an open process,” Dave Voye told Channel 11.
The county and the board of elections invited Channel 11 into their election warehouse Wednesday.
With Pennsylvania being the main focal point of this election, Voye, the Allegheny County Elections Division Manager, is providing full transparency.
“As a battleground state, PA is neck and neck,” he said.
From start to finish, we saw how things will work on Election Day: how the voting machine works, how each vote is counted and where early ballots and mail-in ballots are locked and stored inside the warehouse.
And to make sure all of the machinery works as it should, there are practice runs.
We do all sorts of pre and post-election testing. We test every piece of equipment before it goes out, we print test and sets of ballots where we know the results, and we test every precinct before it goes out,” Voye added.
Here in Allegheny County, more than $18,000 ballots have already been returned.
On Election Day, staff is confident every ballot will be collected from all of Allegheny County’s 766 polling places by midnight.
“It literally takes three or four seconds to transmit those results to update the database,” he added.
Those results are calculated in the warehouse, where there are nearly 70 surveillance cameras inside and county police in and outside the building.
Your ballot is tabulated correctly in this county. There’s no way two ways about it,” Voye said.
In the past, finding poll workers had been one of the biggest challenges, but this year, they have nearly 7,000.
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