OROVILLE — Election cycles can be a grueling time for candidates and officials who oversee the polls, but few find themselves as consistently busy during elections as volunteers who sign up to count ballots.
With the 2024 Primary Election slowly wrapping up, volunteers have started the process of hand counting 1% of the ballot to ensure the numbers line up against the overall results.
“Every time we’ve done this, it’s come out 100%,” said Butte County Elections Official Keaton Denlay. “We do this every election to make sure everything comes out the way we had expected … We used to do this the day after the election and we just found that the people were too tired to sit there and count and do it by hand and any mistakes they made, they would have to start over and count them again.”
Watching volunteers gather in a room on the ground floor of the Candace J. Grubbs Hall of Records, it’s clear that they take the role seriously. Denlay said the system is comprised of checks and balances with each person holding a specific job to make sure the count is accurate.
One person directly checks the ballot one race at a time; for example, the Senate race for each ballot, while a second person looks on to make sure each is checked correctly. A third volunteer then tallies up the votes. Teams are broken up and each is given a batch of ballots to sort through before checking the hand-counted results against the machine-filed results.
“I want people to know that we do it,” Denlay said, speaking on the importance of the potentially tedious process. “It’s good to know that these things are being checked and verified.”
Denlay noted that voting machines have been used for 60-plus years and the hand count has been part of the process.
“There is no digital,” Denlay said. “In the early 2000s, there were electronic voting machines that had memory cards and the memory cards were uploaded to the system and those were counted so in that element there weren’t paper ballots but it was more difficult to check if you didn’t have a paper ballot to go back and check. Now we do have paper ballots to go back to. Since I’ve been doing this, since 2017, this is the way it’s been done.”
The overarching process comes down to accuracy and making sure each vote is counted.
“This is just the last part of the process,” Denlay said of the hand count. “We do logic and accuracy testing at the beginning where we take pre-marked ballots where we know how they are going to be cast, we run the machines and then we check to make sure it gives us what we expect it to give us based on what we put in there. Then the election gets zeroed out and we run the election through and then we do this at the end.”
Denlay said the time it takes to do the hand count varies and is dependent on mistakes, recounts and any other factor that could prolong the process.
“There have been elections where it takes a day and there have been elections where it takes three days,” Denlay said.
As of Monday, the local results for the 2024 Primary Election are still unofficial but will eventually be verified by Denlay and his office.
