MARTINSVILLE, Va. – As thousands and thousands of Americans head to the polls to vote, many factors go into counting those votes to determine who the winner is.
Various registrars across the country - including here in the Virginia Commonwealth - will be counting up each vote made from everyone who casts a ballot.
This includes early ballots, in-person, and mail-in ballots.
Martinsville General Registrar/Director of Elections explained that a machine helps tally the numbers as soon as a person casts their ballot.
“The machine is tallying up those as we speak, as soon as there is a ballot that is entered, when they hit close polls, it tallies up everything,” Workman said. “It takes about ten minutes for that tape to run. Then they record that on their unofficial call-in sheet to call in at the circuit courts office and then we just wait to hear from them.”
Communication is key between the six precincts and the Central Absentee district in Martinsville, which is why Workman’s office receives hourly calls from the precincts to keep vote numbers consistent
“We have our precincts that call in every single hour. They started when the polls opened up at 6, so they started at 7 a.m.,” Workman said. “They’ll call every single hour to give us hourly updates when it comes to keeping them accountable to make sure they are keeping their count and they aren’t off on a number. Then it just allows us to know throughout the day how the turnout is.”
Included in the final turnout will be early voters who cast their votes during the early voting period. Workman says that this year, early voting was unexpectedly popular in Martinsville.
“We had 1,236 in-person voters and we had 408 by-mail voters, so those will be combined in at the end of the night to the Circuit Clerk’s Office upstairs at 7:00,” Workman said.
Workman believes that these numbers set a new record for Martinsville.
After polls closed and all of the precincts call in, the Central Absentee Precinct will bring the paper for in-person and mail-in ballots over in-person to the Circuit Court Clerk’s Office.
“Once those are finished, we will be done tonight. Then of course, we have post election which won’t happen until Friday. Next week we will do a provisional meeting, so we won’t know a final number. Normally, Martinsville city doesn’t have enough post election ballots or provisional ballots to change the numbers unless it is a very close race, so we should know tonight [Tuesday].”