When you’re done voting in Dallas County, where does your ballot go?

He explained how a voter’s ballot journeys from the voting machine to the final tally and how myriad security measures from a “highly prescriptive” Texas election code dictate nearly every step. Dallas County has prioritized transparency as skepticism over election security has risen, Scarpello said, including from Republican and Democratic poll watchers who received more latitude to monitor the proceedings under a law passed last year.

“We get poll watchers that come in here guns a-blazing,” he said. “We walk them through the process and they end up with more trust.”

What happens when you vote?

The familiar scene Dallas County voters will see at their local school, church or other polling location on Election Day doesn’t give a sense of the scope of the operation that trains about 3,000 election workers and deploys more than 4,800 voting machines to about 450 polling locations.

When voters check in, a poll worker verifies their voter registration and identity under the state’s voter ID law before giving them a long strip of paper that will become their paper ballot.

The voter inserts the ballot into an ES&S voting machine and selects their choices via touch screen. It then prints a paper ballot they insert into a tabulator device, where it is counted electronically and stored. The machine has 10 different locks on it and seals indicating if the stored hard copy ballots are ever removed or tampered with.

Where does your vote go?

After polls close and the final voter casts a ballot, an election judge loads votes from that facility onto two USB drives. The judge takes one drive and paper ballots to the central counting facility on Round Table Drive, while the other drive remains in a sealed and locked case inside the tabulator machine in case the primary USB drive is damaged in transit.

The central counting room remains under bipartisan observation throughout the night, and state law requires every facility to conduct live webcasts. Each USB drive is logged and inserted into the central counting computers, where its votes are added to countywide totals. The drive is then placed in a sealed pouch and a binder and stored in an on-site vault.

State law requires the central counting computers to be disconnected from the internet, as with voting machines. The computers display results on a bank of large television screens that are transcribed and updated on Dallas County’s website every 30 minutes.

What if I mail my ballot?

The elections office is already verifying signatures on mail-in ballot envelopes by comparing them to ones already on file. It’s completed early so that voters can verify their ballots in case their signatures don’t match, which can happen if they change over time.

Mail-in ballot counting starts when early voting concludes, which is Nov. 4 this election cycle. All absentee ballots must be postmarked by the time polls close at 7 p.m. on Nov. 8. Domestic mail-in ballots must arrive at an elections office by the next business day after the election. Foreign absentee ballots are counted about a week after the election.

On Election Night, officials will perform a “preliminary reconciliation,” a process required under state law that compares the total number of ballots in the computer count with the total number of paper and mail-in ballots.

It is one of several counts that will happen in the days that follow, leading up to a final canvass of the vote.

“The expectation is perfection, which is hard to do,” Scarpello said. “Remember that we’re working with people who do this twice a year.”