Behind the scenes of processing early votes in DC

WASHINGTON — We are looking at election security. As the early votes comes in, how are the votes being handled and secured?

WUSA9 followed DC’s Board of Elections to take us behind the scenes to show what happens after your ballot is cast.

Our team went to the Fort Stanton recreation center in Southeast to find out what happens to the early votes, mail-in votes, and the dropped-off ballots.

As soon as the polls close, David Mayes and his team secure the station. They first close the voting machines and the tally machine.

“It says 578, it probably said another count yesterday,” Mayes said. “I'll just record that with my phone and send that to headquarters.

Those votes won’t be counted until Tuesday. The real processing today comes from the mail-in votes and ballot box drops.

The bags of physical mail-ins or drop-offs gets put in a bag, secured, and then sent to headquarters.

Once the mail-ins and drop offs get to headquarters, Stacy Burrows’ team takes over.

“Our team here checks in each ward as the bag arrives,” Burrows explained.

After several security checks and getting sorted by ward, the votes got to the processing team.

“What we typically do is we go through the mail first to ensure that there's no other non-election related mail that's in the stacks,” she said.

After the checks for signatures, then the mail-in ballots go through a mail sorter. The mail sorter checks the ballots and their signatures for authenticity. Think of it like a computer check point.

After they pass through twice the ballots then go back to the processing team.

“We will take the ballots, we open the ballots, we separate the ballots from the voters return envelope,” Burrows said. “So at that point, we still don't know who voted for whom.”

The final step is the separate ballots going through a tallying machine. Then on Tuesday, the tally machine will count the votes. That is the thorough process early votes go through.