Election workers throughout Maryland resumed the counting of mail-in ballots Thursday, after completing Election Day returns.
Unlike workers in some critical swing states who did not begin counting mail-in ballots until this week, Maryland election workers began sorting and counting early ballots in October. More than 1.3 million mail-in ballots were returned to the state before Election Day.
At the sprawling Baltimore City Board of Elections’ Voting Machine Warehouse in West Baltimore, masked workers sat well over six feet apart from each other, but operating in teams, to sort, process and count these ballots as their managers looked on.
All the while, the city board broadcast their canvassing work online.
“Things are going real well and we look to move forward and work towards certification by next week,” Armstead Jones, the Baltimore City Board of Elections director, said.
Counting will continue through this week and possibly into the next, Jones said. Results are scheduled to be certified by Nov. 13.
When the Maryland Board of Elections mailed all eligible voters mail-in ballot applications over the summer, voters who could not receive a ballot in the mail were given the option of receiving it through email. The board asked voters not to choose the internet delivery option unless absolutely necessary, as it slows down the count.
Jones was unsure of the exact number of these types of ballots his workers had to process, but said that it was quite a few.
Workers began the tedious process of counting these types of ballots, called recreation, on Thursday. The ballots printed at home on standard printer paper cannot be read by counting machines, so workers must recreate the information on each web ballot onto a ballot that can.
Each ballot has a unique tracking number that does not allow it to be counted more than once. Once a web ballot arrives at the warehouse, workers check the number before they proceed to recreate it.
That can take a long time, because it involves matching each web ballot to its type of ballot style, which depends on where a voter lives.
“Since there's 296 styles, we have to pull them by hand and put them together with the ballot that was emailed so someone can recreate it,” election worker Ivan McAfee said.
The workers do have several tools at their disposal to make the process slightly less arduous, such as a machine that can open up to 50 envelopes in a matter of seconds by delicately slicing their flaps.
“It’s a more efficient way to get the ballots out of their envelopes than manually,” election worker Curt Baskerville said.
All in all, Jones said, the second election to be held during the pandemic went much more smoothly than the primary in June, when in-person early voting was not an option. In that election, polling centers saw long lines and some ballots were mistakenly formatted.
“Once you've gone through it once, you know some of the factors that you need to put into play to make sure that everyone is being safe,” he said.
