How does the Erie County Voter Registration count your vote?

The process begins well before Election Day. It involves two separate but similar processes, one for mail-in and absentee ballots and another for votes cast at the polls. Here's how it works.

Workers timestamp ballots as they arrive. They scan a barcode on the outer envelope to determine a person's voting precinct and to record that their ballot has been received. The ballot — still in both its inner (secrecy) envelope and outer (mailing) envelope — is placed in a precinct-specific bin, according to Erie County Clerk of Elections Julie Slomski and Election Supervisor Tonia Fernandez.

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The process of pre-canvassing cannot legally begin until polls open at 7 a.m. on Election Day. Erie County usually starts around 9 a.m. One team separates the outer envelope from the secrecy envelope. Another team removes the ballot from the secrecy envelope. This ensures that a person's vote is kept secret because the outer envelope contains their signature. The secrecy envelope does not.

The ballot is fed into a central scanner, which makes a digital image of the ballot and records the person's vote. Election workers are not privy to how votes are being cast until after polls close when a report is generated from the scanner.

On the morning of the election, before polls open, a volunteer election worker is required to run a report that's known as "zero tape," which ensures there are no votes on the memory card inside the scanner. Ballots are fed into the scanner as people vote.

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All equipment and supplies, including unused ballots, are transported to the Erie County Voter Registration Office. A memory card from the scanner is removed and read, generating another report on the vote total.

Election officials run reports on the results from the polls first. Once all 149 precincts have reported the in-person vote, the office runs another report for mail-in ballots that have been processed at that point.

Other mail-in and absentee ballots, particularly those that arrive on the day of the election, are processed and scanned throughout the day, into the evening and even the next day depending on the volume of ballots that arrive.

In an election with a high volume of mail-in ballots, the process can take days. Results are published on the office's website throughout the process.

Once votes are tallied, the Voter Registration Office publishes a "final unofficial count."

In the days following the election, the Voter Registration Office begins the final official count, which includes a process called "adjudication."

The process involves reviewing and counting provisional ballots and military and overseas ballots, which can be received up to seven days following the election. It also involves reviewing ballots a scanner has flagged because of an overvote (voting for too many candidates than permitted), ambiguous marks on a ballot, and write-in votes. The scanned digital image of these ballots is reviewed one by one on a computer.

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Contact Matthew Rink at mrink@timesnews.com. Follow him on Twitter at @ETNrink.