40,000 In-Person Early Ballots Opened Wednesday

--- all the early in-person votes had to be hand counted in vanderburgh county-- that process started this morning.

44news reporter marisa patwa takes an up close look at the process.

While vanderburgh county voters normally find out the election results late into the night on presidential election day -- that has not been the case this year "we quit over here at the old national events plaza a little bit after 6 last night in opening the absentee ballots."

--- leaving over forty thousand votes still needing to be counted as of wednesday and vanderburgh county clerk carla hayden says high voter turn out -- coupled with the new state mandated system of voting paper instead of electronic ballots for early voting -- has made it difficult to process through them this year "so, the in person votes were treated very much like the in- person votes were treated yesterday.

The data was just read into a computer and then we had totals.

With the paper trail we have now with the new voting machines -- anything that was cast in-person before election day -- also went into an envelope and has to be open -- so that's 40,000 more envelopes to open then we have in years past."

And to make things fair -- democrats and republicans have been split up into teams to go through the forty thousand -- in -- person early voting ballots.

They also have to make sure there are two signatures from poll workers on those ballots before they are sent over to the civic center to be scanned in the voting machine."

"so if there are any discrepancies though, like we can catch discrepancies, but then we set those aside and the attorneys with the clerk's office will go through the discrepancies and make their ruling."

Hayden says it's truly been an unusual year -- for the electoral process and hopes twenty twenty four will look much different.

"it is unusual that we don't get through all of the ballots on election night.

Obviously, we've had many nights where it's been 2 a.m.

Or something and we could get through but we just knew we would not be able to get through."

As for the results they won be officially certified until the election board meets in ten days.

Reporting in evansville marisa patwa