Looking at the highlights from the January 6 Commitee hearing this week, there were two key takeaways from this week hearings — both related to the vote counting process.

First, as anybody who has been involved with campaign at any level knows, votes are not instantly reported at the same time.  Instead, election results roll in as precincts turn in their results and counties count absentee and “federal” ballots (ballots case by military and overseas voters that just cover federal and statewide elections).   More importantly, results by precinct and by county are not random — either in timing or in the vote counts.  There is a regular patten by which results are reported and an expected result by precinct and county.

To use my home county for an example, it is a small county that typically has between 12,000 and 15,000 votes.  While the exact number of precincts has changed, it has always been between 15 and 20 precincts.  In the years that I have lived, there have been changes.  We have gone from a central counting process in which the ballot boxes in each precinct were just ballot boxes and the counting machine was in the courthouse to a precinct counting process in which the ballot boxes are also counting machines and the central counting part of the process is simply downloading the results from each precinct and adding the results together.  This change has speeded up the process (as the county election authority no longer has to run 15,000 ballots through the counting machine and reset the machine for each precinct) and we typically have the full results by 8:30 p.m. (ninety minutes after the polls close) rather than 11:00 p.m.  Additionally, the results are posted on-line as soon as the printout of a precinct’s result can be scanned and uploaded thereby eliminating the need to sit around the courthouse waiting for a copy of the printouts.  But what hasn’t changed is that there is a rough sequence in which the precincts are reported.  In most elections, the first precincts to report are the smaller towns close to the county seat (in the north central part of the county).  Those precincts get to the courthouse first because they are only 5-10 minutes away from the courthouse, and — given their small size — they tend to have few people in line at 7 p.m. and can quickly get to the process of closing the precinct and packing up the ballots and counting device to take to the courthouse.  On the other hand, the five large precincts in the southeast and southwest of the courthouse tend to be the last ones to get to the courthouse as they have the furthest to go and tend to have lines at 7 p.m. (and thus take longer to close as the closing process does not begin until the last person has voted).  In short, while the exact sequence may change some from election to election (as the exact time when the election judges get to the courthouse depends on how long the lines are). Continue Reading...