How Philadelphia election workers will race to count votes this fall

Voting by mail is simple enough: Fill out a ballot, slip it in an envelope and send it to an election office.

Counting those votes, however, is laborious. And in Philadelphia — the biggest city in the most-populous swing state — it takes an assembly line of special machinery and highly trained staff working nonstop to reach the final results. Even then, it can take days to finish the count because of a state law that prevents election officials from processing mail ballots until 7 a.m. on Election Day.

With mail voting now underway, these officials are preparing for a race against the clock on Nov. 5. They must not only run a smooth election but stay ahead of an onslaught of misinformation that has already begun. Former president Donald Trump and some of his allies have attacked mail voting and amplified baseless claims about Pennsylvania’s ballots, laying the groundwork for a possible repeat of their attempts in 2020 to undermine the election while the state’s mail votes were being tallied.

The Washington Post visited Philadelphia’s election warehouse on April 16 and April 23, the day of Pennsylvania’s primary, to observe each step in the processing of mail ballots. The following is an up-close look at how it works and why, if the race between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris remains tight, the state’s final results probably won’t be known on election night.




https://www.washingtonpost.com/elections/interactive/2024/philadelphia-mail-ballots-election/