The primary election may be over, but Carbon County’s Bureau of Election’s work is far from done.

On Thursday afternoon, Lisa Dart, elections director, showed reporters the time-consuming process of counting write-in ballots.

“Anything that is questioned at all goes into these buckets (folders in the adjudication folder) and then we have to look at every single one to determine what’s what,” Dart said.

She said that the county received approximately 3,026 ballots that needed to be adjudicated due to either over-votes or ambiguous marks by the voter or write-in votes in various races.

But the process in which they are counted is a two-person job and one ballot at a time.

Dart said that of the ballots that need to be adjudicated, there could be upward of 10 write-ins on each ballot.

For example, in Summit Hill, most candidates on the Democratic ticket also received write-in votes on the Republican side.

How it works

The process of adjudication begins with the scanned ballots in question being moved to an adjudication folder by the system.

From there, Dart must open each ballot separately, look at the name of the write-in and check it against the database the department has for that election.

If the write-in name is not in the database, she must then type in the name and update the database before being able to log the write-in vote.

Once the write-in name is in the database, Dart can then go back to the electronic ballot and count that vote.

The process is then repeated for every write-in on that ballot.

Dart said the process is time-consuming, noting that she can get through approximately 100 ballots in an hour.

As of noon on Thursday, the elections office had 2,712 ballots remaining to be adjudicated.

“We want the totals, but we want it right,” she said. “I know it is electronic, but we still have to look at them.

“No body realizes how tedious this is,” Dart added.

The election

Dart said some precincts ran out of ballots for nonparty affiliated voters and rovers had to either deliver more or the precincts used the electronic tablet that they had to allow those votes to be cast.

The Carbon County Commissioners said the election wasn’t nearly as bad as the presidential election, when over 11,000 mail-in and absentee ballots were received and the state was changing rules often.

“(The employees) were left to do their job,” Commissioner Rocky Ahner said, commending the department for the quick turnaround with results.

The commissioners and Dart stopped short on providing a date on when the write-ins will be done. Election results must be complete by the 20th day after the election.

The county election board met Friday morning to begin open canvassing.