County plans to count 14,000 mail-in ballots on Election Day

Stacking manila envelopes and studying signatures are all the 26 county absentee board members have known for the past few weeks.

The board arrives at the county’s Voter Registration office at 8 a.m. every day, ready to work. Since the beginning of October, thousands of mail-in ballots have trickled into the courthouse basement to be checked in.

Poll workers sort through the stacks of envelopes, checking signatures, matching ballots to applications, and placing them into proper precincts, each one in alphabetical order. The ballots are then moved to assigned locked boxes where they will wait to go through that same vetting process again before they can be counted officially.

More than 14,000 Johnson County residents applied to vote by mail in this year’s presidential election as concerns about the safety of in-person voting during the ongoing coronavirus pandemic loomed. By comparison, just more than 3,000 voted by mail during the last presidential election in 2016.

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The Johnson County Clerk’s Office received 13,304 ballots by the end of last week, said Trena McLaughlin, county clerk. Voters have until noon Tuesday to return the ballots to the clerk’s office at the courthouse.

Working together to make it happen

The plan is to have all the mail-in ballots counted on Election Day, possibly by 7 p.m., when the first vote centers are expected to start reporting the results of in-person voting, said Julie Turley, absentee board member. In-person voting will run from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Tuesday at more than 20 vote centers throughout the county.

Indiana law prohibits early ballots from being counted before Election Day, so absentee board members will start opening the already-organized envelopes bright and early, at 6 a.m. Counters will be split into 13 teams, each covering different precincts and each with members from both parties, said Trena McLaughlin, county clerk. The teams will check each envelope again, open the ballots, and prepare each one to go through a machine that processes it.

Four other teams will manage the four machines, an increase from the three that were used during the primary in June, when all mail-in ballots were counted just a few hours after the polls closed.

"I’m not expecting any issues. I’m hoping I don’t have any issues," McLaughlin said.

Absentee ballots will be counted until the first vote center reports its totals after the polls close at 6 p.m., and then the focus will shift to getting those numbers, McLaughlin said. If all mail-in ballots are not counted by that time, workers will return to counting those after all the precincts are reported late that night, she said.

Poll workers on the absentee board will spend most of today re-vetting and filling out a report for the thousands of ballots already received and locked away. This second check-in process has to be done before any ballot goes through the machine.

Turley and Kathy Kidd, another poll worker and absentee board member, started working on this as early as Friday morning, so there would be less to do today. 

"It’s kind of fun," Turley said. "We always tell everybody that by the time (ballots) are opened on Election Day, they will be touched by us about 20 different times."

Turley and McLaughlin, along with other absentee board members, got together several times over the summer to come up with a plan for counting ballots on Election Day. The brainstorming resulted in an extra scanner to count ballots and 26 poll workers, up from 20 in the spring. 

"Props to Trena because she really gave us the go saying, ‘You guys are in the trenches. How will this work better? If we get you this many teams, how can you make this work?’" Turley said.

Kidd, who was re-checking ballots Friday, is a first-time poll worker. She and some friends in a Bible study group decided it would be good to help out with so many extra mail-in ballots coming in this year, she said. 

"We had no idea what we were getting ourselves into," Kidd said. "I really enjoyed it though."

Kidd and a fellow poll worker, Sheila Wooten, learned a lot about the election process by volunteering to count, including how safe it is to vote by mail, they said. 

"It’s really interesting and enlightening, and I’ve been able to tell other people who felt like it wasn’t safe, that ballots are lost … that’s not how it works here with our clerk," Wooten said.

"We’re all working together. No one’s fighting," Kidd added.

Some results may not be known election night

Despite the county’s plan to count all 14,000 mail-in ballots by the end of Election Day, residents may not know the results of several big races — especially those that overlap with other counties — for days or weeks. That includes races for President, Congress, governor and state legislature spots in districts that stretch into Marion County.

In Marion County, more than 90,000 people requested to vote by mail, and it is unlikely election workers will count all the ballots in one night, McLaughlin said. During the primary, Marion County finished counting absentee ballots about week after Election Day.

"I think some of the smaller counties, I think you’re going to know. But bigger counties like Marion County, I can’t tell you," McLaughlin said.

When asked about how long Indiana should have to count mail-in ballots during one of his weekly press conferences, Gov. Eric Holcomb said, "they’ll count all of them that qualify to be counted."

For a ballot to be qualified, it must be received no later than noon on Election Day. A federal court ruling in September briefly decided that absentee ballots postmarked on or before Nov. 3 and received by Nov. 13 would be counted, but that ruling was overturned two weeks later in the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

McLaughlin agrees with the appeals court’s decision to overturn the ruling. Receiving ballots by noon on Election Day is the law, and it should not change, she said. 

"At least here in Johnson County, we have given voters ample time. We have given them all the options to make sure they get it back here in time," McLaughlin said. "Nov. 3 is the Election. I’m in complete agreement with it."

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Here is a look at the number of Johnson County residents voting by mail:

Absentee ballot applications: 14,302

Ballots received by Friday: 13,304

Voted by mail in 2016: 3,228

Source: Johnson County Voter Registration

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Today is the last day to vote early in Johnson County. Voters can cast their ballots in person from 8:30 a.m. to noon at the Johnson County courthouse, 5 E. Jefferson St., Franklin.

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