Votes pass through many hands on way to San Jose
Chris Bone – Staff Writer
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GILROY
Whether you voted by mail three weeks ago or tapped candidates on a touch screen Tuesday morning, your vote passes through a gauntlet of approval in San Jose.
That’s where the Santa Clara County Registrar of Voters tallies the ballots, beginning with the thousands of absentee paper ballots returned over the past three weeks.
For the rest of the electorate who preferred nearby fire stations and garages, though, poll workers had to drive voters’ individual memory cartridges to several satellite return centers throughout the county after polls closed at 8 p.m., according to SCCRV spokesman Matt Moreles.
As soon as 8 p.m. rolls around, Moreles said he and dozens of other employees begin tabulating the results of the absentee ballots that have already been scanned and counted, but not tallied.
A secure room full of SCCRV employees counts these early votes while trucks full of the electronic ballots rumble north on U.S. 101 toward San Jose.
“So our first results are reported one minute after 8 o’clock, and these are the absentee ballots,” Moreles said. Then after an hour or so, “it’s just a big room full of computer terminals and people plugging cartridges in and out.”
Depending on voter turnout, Moreles said he would stick around until 10 or 11 p.m. Tuesday night, continuously updating the registrar’s Web site to reflect the ongoing count.
“We have to wait for the results from every polling place, and then we post the semi-official results online, but they’re not final because of outstanding vote-by-mail ballots, provisional ballots, manual recounts, and other paper work that we won’t finish until the election is certified,” which is legally required within 28 days of the election, Moreles said.
“Really what we’re going for on election night is to get all the precinct results in,” he said.
Gilroy had 16 polling places this year and a total of 15,223 registered voters, 3,499 of which had mailed in their ballots in before Tuesday.
