After you cast your vote at a polling place in the upcoming general election, your ballot will follow a path that begins within the bowels of a voting machine and ends with officials from the Delaware Superior Court certifying vote tallies statewide.
What happens in between is a complex system that first involves a voting machine recording a voter’s choices in three different places – onto an electronic memory card, onto an internal voting machine tape, and onto a paper ballot that is stored within the voting machine.
Elections officials have advertised the paper ballot feature as one that they say ensures votes are recorded accurately, because it allows voters to visually confirm that their digital choices leave a paper trail.
The paper ballot includes the written names of candidates picked, as well as a corresponding barcode into which those names are embedded.
While a vote is recorded in multiple ways, Delaware’s Elections Director for New Castle County Tracey Dixon indicated that the official record is the written name on the paper ballot.