Post Election Rundown: Sorry, what is an "orphan ballot" and how can it effect an election?

November 19, 2016 - There are many phases to post election ballot counting - especially as you begin the process of final checks prior to certification. As races narrow, any change can be dramatically highlighted - but they can happen.

Orphan ballots are single page ballots that "might" be missing their second page. This can generally happen in one of two ways:

1.  The voter (and this is the most common) mails their two-page ballot in with only a single page included.
2.  During high-speed processing the first or second page of a two page ballot becomes separated during the processing.

Because we must scan a complete ballot during the bulk of ballot processing, orphan ballots are set aside, or "rejected".  Once we have completed the majority of ballot scanning we then go on the hunt for the missing ballot pages. This is not finding a needle in a haystack, it's finding a kernel of rice in a wheat field. Although it sounds daunting, we have perfected this process. We utilize teams, armed with barcode scanners, and we begin the painstaking process of searching through about 670,000 paper ballots, or 1.2 million sheets of paper, looking for those single "orphan ballots".

What if the voter truly did not return the second page? Once we have made that determination then just the page that was returned is scanned. But if we do find the second page then we scan it as a "single ballot". This is how a very tight race can change by one or two votes all the way to final certification.

Who said elections were easy?