Compare the Poll Tapes Against the Precinct-by-Precinct Election Results

(part 2 of a 3-part series)

In most states, the county election administrator publishes election results with vote totals for each candidate broken down by precinct.  Here’s an example from Mercer County, New Jersey, from the 2024 General Election (click on Detail XLS, Detail XML, or Detail TXT to get the spreadsheet in one format or another).  The Mercer County Clerk is an able and conscientious election administrator, but how do we know she got it right?

(not shown here the columns for other candidates)

Well, if you were in the Borough of Hightstown’s Precinct 2 polling place at 8pm on election night, you would have been permitted to look at the poll tapes printed out by the voting machine.  New Jersey law requires the poll workers to post the poll tapes for anyone to look at.

If there was just one optical-scan voting machine, it should have said that Frederick Montferrat got 180 votes in that precinct; if there were two voting machines there, the numbers for Mr. Montferrat should have added up to 180.  After the County Clerk posted the results, you could compare at number to the Excel spreadsheet (Detail XLS), tab 12, cell F5.   Then you’d know that there was no error or fraud in transmitting and reporting the election results from precinct 2.  If you did that for every precinct, you could add up the precincts yourself and be confident that Mr. Montserrat received 781 votes in election-day polling places.  This is the way the process used to work, from 1890 (or before) to about 2010, even before the precinct results took the form of cash register tapes.

But these days, that would give an incomplete picture.  The Clerk’s detail report shows that Mr. Montferrat also got 331 votes in early voting and 474 votes in vote-by-mail.  How can you audit those numbers?

Mercer County has 8 early vote centers.   Any registered voter in the county can vote at any of the vote centers.  There are several days of early voting.  They don’t print out poll tapes each day, because the election results are not supposed to be examined before the close of the polls on Election Day.  But at the end of the election, each voting machine in each vote center prints out a poll tape.    To audit, you’d have to examine all the poll tapes from all the vote centers and add up the votes for Mr. Montserrat on all those tapes; it should come out to 331. 

It would be easier to audit, and far easier to narrow down the cause of discrepancies if any occur, if the results were published, broken down by tabulator (that is, the numbers from each voting machine).  Still, at least the Early Vote numbers are clearly distinguished from the Election Day numbers.  There’s enough detail in the County Clerk’s report to be able to make sense of the poll tapes.

What about the Vote by Mail numbers?  Mail-in (and drop-box) ballots are handled by a different procedure, procedure (I have previously described New Jersey’s procedure; other states are similar). When the ballots are run through the high-speed county-central optical-scan voting machines, the machines keep track of vote counts broken down by precinct.  The vote totals will be retained in the machine’s memory and not revealed until an explicit report is run, on Election Day.  This report is, effectively, the “poll tape” for the central scanner. (In Union County NJ (and presumably other NJ counties) the count happens during an open public meeting of the Election Board. Members of the public can watch, can request a copy of the results, and there’s a zoom link for those who wish to observe the process from afar.)

Unofficial versus Certified results

As vote results arrive at the central office (typically on thumbdrives from all the individual voting machines), the Election Administrator makes these “unofficial” results available to the public and to the news media.  But it may take a few more days to make sure that all the votes have been counted or uploaded.   After that, the Administrator produces “certified” results and sends them to state officials.   A detailed precinct-by-precinct release of the unofficial results can be really useful to members of the public who want to compare poll tapes to election results; and it can be useful in making clear which voting machines’ data has not been uploaded yet.   New Jersey passed a law just 3 years ago requiring county clerks to promptly publish unofficial results, but not all NJ counties publish precinct-by-precinct unofficial results; all counties and states should do that.  New Jersey for more than a century has required precinct results to be witnessable by the public in the precinct as soon as the polls close; all states should do that.    And it matters how the tables of published results are organized; I’ll explain that in part 3 of this series.