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SANTA FE COUNTY CLERK’S OFFICE - What Happens to My Ballot after I Vote?

A common fear among voters is their ballots will not be counted—we at the Santa Fe County Bureau of Elections often hear the comment, “They only count Absentee or Provisional Ballots if the election is close.” Not true. By law, we must count every legally cast ballot and do so within specific deadlines. Further, we must account for and protect all ballots.

If you vote at your polling place or at one of the Early Voting sites during a General Election, you place your ballot into an M-100 Tabulator that scans and counts your votes. No one knows, however, the total number of votes cast for any contest from any of the Tabulators until after the polls close at 7:00 PM on Election Night. Then Presiding Judges run and post the results tapes that show the totals. For Tabulators used at the Early Voting sites, this operation takes place at the SF County Warehouse on Election Night. The computer cards from the machines are then transferred to the County Clerk’s Office where their numbers are compiled to give the preliminary grand total.

If you vote an Absentee Ballot—one sent to you at your request with a multitude of instructions and envelopes—you must return it to the County Clerk’s Office or your polling place by 7:00 PM on Election Day. All Absentee Ballots received before Election Day are logged in and then transferred in locked ballot boxes to the SF County Warehouse, where several days before the Election, the Absentee Board gathers to count the ballots. Members verify that outer envelopes have all the necessary information (name, address, year of birth, and signature of the voter): missing information means the ballot, by law, cannot be counted. Once the outer envelope is removed, your ballot is truly secret because there is no name or identifier on either the ballot or the inner privacy envelope. The Absentee Board removes the inner privacy envelope and runs the ballots through a high-speed tabulator. Any ballots rejected by the tabulator are hand-tallied by teams of two people from different political parties.

All counting of Absentee Ballots must be completed by the close of polls on Election Night. The one exception is Absentee Ballots turned in to either the County Clerk’s Office or to a voter’s polling place on Election Day. The Absentee Board hand-tallies these ballots at the County Clerk’s Office on Election Night. Machine-counted and hand-tallied totals are added to the grand total.

If you vote a Provisional Ballot—one given to you if you vote outside your home precinct—that ballot is delivered to the County Clerk’s Office at the end of Election Night by the Presiding Judge of the precinct where you voted. The following day, County staff members verify that those who voted Provisional Ballots are registered in Santa Fe County. If the voter is not registered, the ballot cannot be counted. Then the ballots are hand tallied—with a difference. Because the voter was not in his/her home precinct, the ballot voted might have contests for which the voter is not eligible to vote. Only those contests that the person is legally able to vote for are counted. Hand tallies must be completed within ten days after the election. The numbers from the hand-tallies are added to the grand total.

Regardless of which method a person chooses to vote—absentee, early, provisional, at the polls—or how the ballots are counted—by machine or by hand—the actual paper ballots are all stored in locked ballot boxes for 45 days. Each box has two locks, the keys of which are kept separately by the County Clerk and the District Judge. It takes a court order to open any ballot box, which happens if there is a challenge by one of the candidates or if there is a post-election audit, as happened this year in the Robles/Fuller contest for the Court of Appeals. After the 45 days, the ballots are moved to storage boxes and kept for 22 months. At the end of that time, the ballots are destroyed.

Relatively few ballots received by 7 p.m. on Election Day are not counted, and the vast majority of ballots counted by the end of Election Night. If need be, the paper ballots are safely stored, ready for challenges or recounts.