Polls closed at 6 p.m. in Monroe County, Indiana.
County clerk Nicole Browne has said during the run-up to Election Day this year that results might not be available Tuesday night.
That’s due in part to the fact that mail-in absentee ballots can’t be removed from their envelopes until Election Day. Around 15,000 ballots were sent to voters who requested them. Of those, as of two days ago, close to 14,000 ballots had been sent in.
By way of comparison, for the June 2, primary elections, about 17,500 people voted by mail. That was a number big enough that it pushed local results to the following day.
For the primary election, just seven polling sites were used. For the general election today, voters cast ballots at 28 different polling sites. That’s four times as many reports from polling sites that need to be processed, compared to the primary.
For today’s general election, two races have registered write-in candidates—for county commissioner and for at-large county council. The scanners can tell which ballots had someone’s name written in and they are segregated into a set for review by human eyeballs. But reviewing them one at a time is a necessary step, to ensure that just those write-in votes are counted for the candidates who registered.
The raw number of total ballots is also expected to be greater than in the primary. In 2016, about 60,000 people voted in Monroe County, which was about twice the 27,000 people who voted in this year’s primaries.
The Square Beacon will report whatever information is available from the Monroe County clerk’s office, as soon as it’s available. Some results from other counties across the state might be available on the election results webpage that has been set up by Indiana’s secretary of state. Continue reading “Alea iacta est: Nov. 3, 2020 election results, when served”
