PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — Philadelphia's newly acquired machinery to count mail-in ballots is expected to speed up the process on Election Day.
Philadelphia County Commissioners gave a tour of the Philadelphia Election Warehouse in Northeast Philly Friday, where mail-in ballots will be counted starting at 7 a.m. on Election Day.
There, they showed off the machine counting process where trays of accepted ballots are first moved to extraction tables.
The return envelopes are then sliced open and the secrecy envelopes are removed. The secrecy envelopes are then cut open with an Omation grinder and the ballots are taken out and flattened for easy scanning.
City Commissioner Seth Bluestein says the high-speed extraction equipment is a game changer.
“That is the part of the process that is the slowest when removing the ballots from the envelopes,” he said. “If you think about it, we have 200,000 ballots potentially and there is 200,000 secrecy envelopes and 200,000 outer envelopes, which means you are really handling 600,000 pieces of paper, which takes a lot of time.”
The equipment, he says, will help get the job done much faster.
Ballots that are damaged are duplicated and scanned. A senior election staffer reviews each recreated ballot.
Processed ballets are locked in a storage cage where they will be kept until post-election audits are completed.