In accordance with the VOTES ACT, Chapter 92 of the Acts of 2022 [M.G.L. c. 54, § 25B], the City of Newton conducted advanced processing of Early Voted ballots for the Sept. 3 State Primary Election. Ballots were processed on August 28th, 2024 and August 29th, 2024 (100 from each precinct), and LWVN had three members on site to observe the procedures.
City Clerk, Carol Moore, explained to one of the observers that the number of early ballots to be cast in the November election is expected to be significantly higher than in past elections. To help the city process those ballots, they will be using early processing procedures. To prepare for that, the City conducted a “soft opening” of the September primary ballots received prior to Election Day through mail-in voting and early voting to help get poll workers familiar with the process and to help the city identify glitches and places where they can improve the process for November.
On August 28, the city manually processed 100 early ballots from each precinct. There were six tables of a team of two poll workers at each table. The poll workers were instructed: (i) first to scan the code on the back of the envelope or type the voter’s name into the City’s iPad in order to pull up voter registrations and “check in” the voters; (ii) second, to check that the address on the manila envelope matched what is in the voter file, that the ballot matched the party of the voter, with unenrolled voters permitted to vote any one of the three party ballots; and (iii) third, to open a batch of 100 mail -in ballots (inner brown envelopes), one batch from each precinct, and to sort ballots into Republican, Democratic, and Libertarian piles. Poll workers were then instructed to count their ballots manually and to mark the manually counted numbers, not electronic check-in numbers, on their tracking sheets.
An Election Supervisor and on-site attorney was available to answer any questions that came up..
On August 29, the ballots processed from the previous day were fed into a high speed tabulator for counting. As noted on August 28, there are 100 ballots per ward/precinct. The ballots are prepackaged by ward and precinct. They are then fed into the tabulator package by package. The vote count for each ward/precinct is stored on a hard drive and kept private until Election Day when the vote tally is fed into the city’s website system and added to the vote count from that day. They indicated that a receipt of the votes tabulated would be printed out and kept private until Election Day, but will be available after Election Day for evidence of the count.
A representative from the tabulator company was on site to help with any problems related to the feeding of ballots into the machine.
A similar process will be done prior to the general election in November. The City is required to provide notice of the dates (notice for the August dates was posted on the city’s Electronic Posting Board) of the early processing of ballots and observers are welcome to attend.