BEAUFORT COUNTY, S.C. (WSAV) – Have you wondered where your ballot goes after sending it in? Beaufort County hosted a public test on the ballot sorting machines used in this year’s election to give voters a better understanding of how the machines work.
The South Carolina Election Commission updated its ballot scanners for this year’s general election. The reasoning behind – safer and faster results. But many don’t know what the scanners do or how they process your vote.
Vernon Kemp, Beaufort County I.T. election systems manager, sat down with WSAV to show the step-by-step process of running absentee ballots through the machine – starting at 9 AM on election day.
“On that morning, they will start opening up the inner envelopes of the ballots. We have a team doing that and that while the ballots are being opened up, they’re sorting ballots and making sure that all the ballots are grouped into a certain number of batches, which is like 20 or whatever batch we need,” says Kemp.
Once the ballots have been sorted, they will be placed onto the machine, which is called the DS 450. The Beaufort County Voter Registration and Elections office has two of them – which Kemp says, speeds up the process. “These tabulators can run up to… the max is up to about 150 ballots per minute,” says Kemp.