The Dayton Daily News obtained the signatures of six candidates — three Democrats and three Republicans all running against each other — to appoint a reporter as an official election observer in Montgomery County on Election Day.
This was done to provide local voters transparency about the process amid heightened concerns about election integrity raised on the national stage in the runup to Tuesday’s election.
Our reporter had to swear an oath not to interfere in any way with the process or reveal how any person voted and was not permitted to take any photos or video in spaces that could show any ballot details.
Polling locations across Ohio closed at 7:30 p.m., when the count of ballots officially began.
Early votes counted
The first results counted at every election board in the state are early ballots sent in by mail or cast in person. Montgomery County saw a busy early voting season, with more than 42,000 people voting by mail in the county as of Monday afternoon. Another 58,802 people cast a ballot in person at the Montgomery County Board of Elections office before Monday.
Ohio law states early ballots cannot be officially tabulated until polls close on Election Day. Ballot information is processed in the election board’s tabulation room.
Election officials must enter and leave the room in bipartisan pairs. Each task at the board of elections involves one Democrat and one Republican.
Paper ballots are scanned and logged onto USB drives. USB drives containing votes from early voting are plugged into a tabulating computer, which counts the votes. These computers are not connected to the internet.
Some ballots are reviewed another time because they cannot be read by the scanner — this can happen when a voter marks more boxes than what is asked for a ballot item. One election official Tuesday night ran a stack of paper ballots through one of the election board’s scanners. Ballots quickly shot through the scanner in a loop, but some ballots were shot out into separate trays. These ballots were then sorted into piles by a bipartisan collection of election officials, who determined the ballots could be remade.
After votes are tabulated, the results are downloaded onto a USB drive that is transferred to a different computer that has Internet access. Results can be uploaded online and sent off to the Ohio Secretary of State’s Office. Cards are not reused, so no device that interacts with the internet also interacts with computers that count and tabulate votes.
Montgomery County Board of Election directors Jeff Rezabek and Russ Joseph — a Republican and Democrat, respectively — reviewed the first ballot report before 8 p.m. on Election Night and signed off on it before it was uploaded to the election board’s website where residents could view live election results.
Dropbox
At 7:20 p.m., two election officials — a Democrat and a Republican — went out to the county’s drop box located outside the Montgomery County administrative building to prepare for the drop box deadline.
At 7:30 p.m., the election officials marked off where the final car in line was waiting. Drivers waiting in line to drop off their ballots before 7:30 p.m. were permitted to turn in their ballots, but any car that came to the drop box after 7:30 p.m. was turned away.
From there, the two election officials locked the drop box ballots in a bin and carried them into the board of elections office.
Ballots arrive
Cars flooded into the basement of the Montgomery County administrative garage after 8 p.m. on Tuesday as pollworkers drove in to deliver election materials. They were greeted by a bipartisan pair of election officials, who collected ballot boxes and bags from their car.
Montgomery County saw more than 1,600 pollworkers helping out with the election this fall. Ohio law requires two bipartisan pollworkers from every polling location to travel to their local election board after polls close to drop off ballot boxes and USB drives that contain ballot information.
Vehicles coming into the parking lot were logged by election officials. Some election volunteers wearing orange vests directed traffic in the garage as cars entered and exited.
Bags and boxes containing paper ballots were then lugged down a hallway into a storage room lined with shelves.
Volunteers in bright yellow vests also heaved backpacks into the warehouse of the Board of Elections office, where cases using USB cards were opened by a bipartisan duo. These USB drives are tabulated in the same process as early votes.
The other contents of the backpacks — provisional ballots, unvoted ballots, pollbooks and other Election Day equipment — were sorted into bins and placed on a long table.
One box contained items left behind by voters. This includes photo ID cards, passports and other personal items. Dana Chesser, the campaign services specialist with the Montgomery County Board of Elections, said it’s also not uncommon for voters to also leave behind car and house keys.
Results in, work continues
Election observers and media outlets waited in the lobby of the Montgomery County administrative basement throughout the night as results rolled in. A large TV was set up with a livestream feed of the tabulation room.
Final results were posted on the Montgomery County Board of Elections site around 11:30 p.m.
No major issues were reported on Election Night after polls closed. Most of the Election Night employees had left the Montgomery County administrative building before midnight.
But work isn’t finished for the Montgomery County Board of Elections. Election officials must review more than 6,000 provisional ballots, count ballots that arrived by mail after Election Night and certify results before the month ends.
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