Behind the scenes at the Allegheny County elections warehouse - TribLIVE

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A combination of high-tech machinery and old-fashioned paper pushing will be used to process and tabulate election results on Election Day in Allegheny County.

Workers from the county’s election division will be joined by scores of others from 17 other county departments to process votes this year at the warehouse the county uses for elections on Pennsylvania Avenue on Pittsburgh’s North Side.

On Thursday, county officials gave the media a peek behind the scenes in advance of Tuesday’s presidential election. It is the first General Election where people could cast ballots by mail without having an excuse that kept them from the polls. That had been a requirement in Pennsylvania until this year.

The primary election in June provided a trial run of the new system and processing more mail-in ballots, said Chet Harhut, deputy manager of the county’s Elections Division.

Previously, about 40,000 absentee ballots were received; in June, more than 213,000 used mail-in ballots.

And as of 1 p.m. Thursday there were more than 311,000 received for Tuesday’s General Election, Harhut said.

Since June, the county has added more two more machines that scan and tabulate ballots giving it 10 machines that can process as many as 300 ballots per minute.

In reality, the time to process the ballots will vary because the machines need to be loaded and unloaded and each operator will be different, Harhut said.

Before the ballots are counted, people will inspect the outer envelopes of each ballot, checking to see if the signatures match and there is no other questionable information about it. Those with issues will be pulled and evaluated by senior elections officials.

The envelopes will then be opened by a machine and the ballots will be opened and flattened before they’re scanned. No results will actually be tabulated until the polls close at 8 p.m., but the process of opening and scanning the ballots will start when the polls open at 7 a.m., Harhut said.

There’s a lot of moving parts to the system, but he’s confident workers will get the job done.

“I think we just want to be fair and accurate, but quick,” Harhut said.

Ballots cast at the polls will be processed differently.

The county has seven locations where those ballots will be tabulated and electronically sent to the warehouse’s computer.

There are security fail safes for each step of the process that include using secured single-use memory sticks to upload the results. There are 39 surveillance cameras that record the activities in every inch of the 80,000-square-foot warehouse.

“We’re fully confident of our security here,” Harhut said.

Technicians from each of the companies that service the machines will also be on site Tuesday with spare parts and know-how, Harhut said.

No one would take a guess as to how long the process will take. The county has 250 people set to start work at 6:30 a.m. Tuesday; and 150 people to work the 3 to 11 p.m. and 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. shifts.

After that, the officials will evaluate and determine if they’ll keep counting nonstop and what staffing is needed, Harhut said.

Mail-in ballots received after Tuesday will be separated by the day they’re received from Wednesday through Friday, based upon guidance from the Pennsylvania Department of State. Those counts will be added to the election totals depending any U.S. Supreme Court ruling on how they should be handled.

Provisional ballots won’t be counted until next Friday, Harhut said.

Tom Davidson is a Tribune-Review staff writer. You can contact Tom at 724-226-4715, tdavidson@triblive.com or via Twitter .

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