Massion-On Tuesday night, inside a Chevrolet Colorado pickup truck, the sanctity of democracy emerged from the hall of the Knights of Columbus.

At 8:59 pm, driver Matt Meyer and his passenger Jerry MacArthur turned to Northwest Cherry Road and drove east towards Guangzhou. Like the organ transplant courier, the two voting workers are performing the last task-transporting ballots from their polling locations to the Stark County Election Commission.

Meyer is a Democrat and the polling place manager of the Cavaliers Hall. His real job is IT consulting. But in 32 elections, he served as a polling station staff member, and he was a member of a team of 1,000 people working on election day. MacArthur is a Republican who taught mathematics and geometry at Washington High School until multiple sclerosis put him in the second line. 

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Their precious cargo includes four metal boxes, all sealed with tamper-proof pins. In those boxes, called transfer boxes, are printed receipts of white paper, all sealed in plastic bags. This piece of paper is a log of every ballot on the voting machine in the Knights Hall.

Perhaps the most important, at least for statistical unofficial results, is a blue plastic toolbox, sealed in a similar way.

The pickup crosses Highway 21. It drove quickly past St. Mary's Parish, then turned left into Eighth Street NE. Then, turn right onto State Street and head towards Wales Road NE.

In some ways, technology has changed the way elections are conducted. When Jeff Matthews, the director of the Stark County Election Commission, took office in 1991, the county voted for punch cards. In the 2000 presidential election between George W. Bush and Al Gore, the unresolved Chad defeat in Florida accelerated a series of changes through the 2002 "Help the United States Voting Act."

One of them is the device itself.

In 2005, Stark became one of the first counties to switch to touch-screen voting machines. These devices were manufactured by Diebold, which later sold its election business to Dominion Voting Systems. Tuesday was Stark's first use of a newly purchased Dominion machine.

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In some ways, technology has not changed anything.

Before Meyer, MacArthur, and six other election workers left the Cavaliers Hall, poll worker Nancy Yurkovic posted 20 paper receipt reports from the machine on the windows of the hall.

"This is for public viewing," she explained.

Since anyone remembers, this is the way to do it—this is also the instruction of the polling staff ordered by Ohio's chief election official and Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose.

The voting machines are not connected to the Internet or even to each other. Although technology already exists to electronically transmit voting results from the polling place to the election committee, this is not the case. This eliminates the possibility of any system hacking after the voting ends.

Instead, the results are delivered the old fashioned way. Members of both parties, including Meyer and MacArthur, transported ballots from 274 electoral districts in polling stations across the county to the electoral office on Regent Avenue in the northeast.

Their Chevrolet pickup drove north into Wales, and then drove east into Hankins Road NE, or 12th Street NW.

The blue toolbox on the back seat contains a memory card and a small flash drive half the size of an ink pen. There are 20 in total. Each is stuffed into a foam compartment. Each slot is marked with a number. This number determined which of the 20 Dominion ImageCast X machines Meyer removed from it. The voting ended at 7:30 pm, ending 11 hours of voting.

Those memory cards contained all 563 votes cast on the machines in the Knights Hall. This is the polling station for 3,724 registered voters in the four constituencies of Masyong-2D constituency and 6 A, B and C constituencies.

The salary of poll workers is as low as $105.60 a day, or a manager like Meyer pays $200 a day. In most cases, there are equal numbers of Republicans and Democrats in polling stations. But sometimes, cancellations and emergencies can shift the ratio to one side or the other.

However, when the machine needs to be shut down, the process is bipartisan. For starters, even access to the paper printout of each ballot requires a key. Each of the three paper reports produced by each machine must be signed by a Republican and a Democrat before it can be bagged, boxed, and sealed.

Neelam Ahmad is a Democratic poll worker. She had helped write down the total number of votes on each machine earlier. She jumped from one machine to another. Sign her name on the report.

"Both of these are closed," she announced.

"We need a key to unlock."

After signing the paper report, Meyer took out each memory card and put them in the toolbox. He sent a cell phone photo of a complete box to the election office. After receiving the return code, he sealed the box.

"We learn from every election," said Matthews, a director of the board of directors.

Once, due to the loss of the card, the final unofficial result was postponed. It turns out that a voting worker left it in a machine in her car. Now, Quick Photos ensures that all memory cards are resolved on the spot-the emptied machine is now locked in a cage.

Meyer and MacArthur had a great time, most of the time it was the green light. Their pick-up passed the neon sign of Tozzi's On 12th restaurant, and then Meyers Lake. They stopped at the red light at the Cleveland Clinic Mercy Hospital.

In the election committee. The staff of the polling station that is closer has already begun to deliver ballots and attachments.

A team of high school students, retirees, part-time and full-time employees led three lines of transportation to the rear of the board complex. Each blue storage card toolbox was handed over and brought to the IT room through the warehouse area.

Four seated employees sat in front of the computer. One is Bill James; Republican IT guru; the other is his Democratic opponent Tom Viscounte. Every Republican position on the board has a mirror of the Democratic Party.

After the vehicle is connected, the path of each toolbox is tracked and cataloged by the overhead radio frequency identifier on the route to IT. This technology—similar to that used on the bibs of marathon runners—collects time-stamped data about the position of the box at various points.

The transfer box filled with tapes of printed voting machines was similarly escorted into the IT field. 

The windowed rooms are equipped with security cameras and motion detectors. With the advent of the memory card, this is a series of activities. If Meyer and McArthur are indeed medical messengers, then IT is the operating room of the hospital.

When the unofficial results were completed and the final test of the equipment was carried out in the early hours of Wednesday morning, all memory cards and printing papers of every machine in the county were locked inside.

After that, the room can only be entered with a pair of keys-one held by a Democrat; the other a Republican.

Meyer and MacArthur drove north past the hospital, onto Interstate 77, then headed east on U.S. Route 62, and followed a 14-mile drive to approach home. They drove along the hill to the northeast intersection of Middlebranch Avenue.

Outside, near the election board warehouse area, vehicles come and go.

"It's like this incredible dance," said Regine Johnson, deputy director of the election commission.

Everyone has their own role. These include 78-year-old Myron Houmard. He used wheels to return the cart full of returned non-critical election supplies to the warehouse. He began to participate in elections in 1963. After visiting the US military, he returned to work almost every election.

Houmard's tenure can be traced back a long time ago. He remembers the polling station and even the former board director Jim Seccombe who died in 1970. Seccombe is a former congressman and a fashionable dresser.

"The carnations on his lapel and these toned shoes," Houmard recalled.

Houmard said he used to recruit Election Day workers through his relationship with the Stark County Engineer's Office and his relationship with the local softball community, where he worked for 40 years.

"I don't care about'D' or'R', as long as you are a good person," he said.

Despite all precautions taken to protect the integrity of the election, the public and even the candidates and politicians themselves are not completely satisfied. After President Donald Trump lost to Joe Biden in 2020, this skepticism intensified when some Trump supporters shouted fouls.

However, in the subsequent court challenge, every step exposed the allegations of hurriedly calculating the results.

Most of Trump's backlash was directed at Dominion and its voting machine. So when Stark's election committee-currently composed of Democrats Sam Ferruccio and Kody Gonzalez and Republicans Curt Braden and James Mathews-decided to buy a new Dominion machine, controversy ensued.

In a targeted outcry from the so-called Dominion machine hoax, Stark County commissioners questioned the election commission and accused them of not getting the best financial deal.

The commissioners stated that they would not approve the funding until the Ohio Supreme Court ruled that they had no choice. Stark's 1,450 Dominion ICX machines were delivered and tested in time for this election.

Nonetheless, according to two public opinion surveys, just in the recent summer, many Americans expressed serious concerns about the honesty in the election:

Local election officials firmly supported the integrity of the Stark County system and voting machines, and they heard all the conspiracy theories. They say the frustrating part is that the theories usually come from people who have no first-hand knowledge of planning, executing, and tabulating elections.

Braden said that every one of Ohio's 88 counties is not connected to the Internet and uses touch screen machines and optical scanning of ballots at the same time. This fact further strengthens the overall security of the election.

"The beautiful part is... the quilt," he said.  

Pickups from Meyer and McArthur turn right on Harmon Avenue NE, then turn right again on 34th Street. It arrived at the Election Committee at 9:22 PM 23 minutes after leaving the Knights Hall.

About 15 minutes later, Meyer and MacArthur moved slowly in the traffic of poll workers and met the unloading crew. A worker grabbed a blue toolbox with a storage card and took it through the warehouse, holding it above his head from time to time, so that the RFI scanner could record its journey.

In the IT room, it was handed over to the Viscount.

He uploaded the results of each of the 20 Columbus Knights memory cards to his computer one by one. The green bars on his screen track the progress of each load.

Within a few minutes, it was complete.

Using a single-use flash drive, James retrieved the time report of all votes in time. Shortly before 10 pm, he took it to the other side of the room and put it in a separate computer—not connected to another computer—to release one of many network updates throughout the night.

Shortly before midnight, the board certified the unofficial result.

It shows that 48,697 of the 249,100 registered voters in Stark County passed an early vote or voted in a poll on Tuesday. According to the law, the board of directors must approve the formal result before November 23.

The number of ballots cast will increase, because ballots postmarked no later than the day before the election and provisional ballots received at the time of voting can still be counted.

These come from voters who cannot verify their identity or registration status on the spot.