Ahead of the 2026 midterm elections, with high stakes across the country and region, Lane County officials gave members of the media an inside look of how it processes returned election ballots on Friday, Oct. 30.
Lane County Clerk Tommy Gong says he hopes a look into the process will help reduce concerns of election fraud within the community.
“We’re doing everything that we can to try to cover all the bases, so that we can have
as clean of an election process as we can,” Gong says. “That way the voters will have more confidence in our processes.”
There are eight lawful steps the county must take to process a return ballot, ranging from receiving to scanning and storing.
Since Oct. 14, the day counties started to mail out ballots, a bipartisan team of one Democrat and one Republican, lugs a cart of empty plastic totes to the ballot box located outside of the Lane County Elections Office.
The team is initiating the first step in the process: receiving. They collect all the ballots dropped in the box and seal the tote with one-time use security seals.
“Ballot security is the utmost important part to us,” Gong says, adding that the keys that are used to open the ballot box “are unique keys to Lane County.”
The team then transfers the tote to the receiving room, where another bipartisan team confirms the serial numbers of the seals and begins the second step: sorting.
The team sorts the ballots into batches of no more than 200 and places them in mail trays.
Ballots then enter a crucial step into ballot processing: signature review. Ballots cannot be counted without a signature review. To help speed up this step, the county invested in a machine back in 2018 with an automated signature verification software. This machine scans each ballot and verifies the signature on it, using signatures from registration cards, DMV office and other sources.
Verified ballots are stored in green trays, while ballots with unverified signatures are placed in yellow trays. The unverified ballots are then transferred to a human-system, where a highly trained team manually tries to verify the signatures.
There are multiple reasons the software could not verify a signature, including someone’s signature changing with age or time, according to Gong.
The county mails a “cure letter” to a voter to help voters remedy their ballots if they made a mistake, like not signing the packet or the county can’t verify their signature. Ballot curing is the process of correcting technical errors such as signatures that don’t appear to match. Voters have 21 days after election day to respond to the letter.
Ballots then move to a room where deconstruction teams, never of the same political party, sort each part of a ballot packet.
“We have a Rep and a Dem. And a Dem or a Nonpartition working together. Not two of the same party,” Gong says.
He adds that the deconstruction step includes, “preparing the ballots to be counted by extracting them out of the envelopes and then unfolding the ballots.”
During this time, the teams are also keeping count of every batch.
“Everything that we do, from beginning to end, from the time we retrieve it from the drop box, we had seals on it, from the time we put it through the envelope sorter,” Gong says. “We’re catching each envelope that’s being processed.”
Some ballots could also enter the reconciliation step — ballots with tears or two voted ballots found in one envelope. Election workers try to reconcile these outlier ballots.
Ballots are then scanned, using a digital image scanner, in the “closed-eviornment” counting room.
“It is not connected to the outside,” Gong said. “There is no networking outside of this room. It’s not connected to the Wi-Fi. It’s not connected to the internet, especially the voting components in there are only networked to the components of the room.”
Gong says this procedure is to help ensure there is “no interference whatsoever from the outside” during the scanning and counting process.
Even though ballots are being scanned in the counting room, the ballots are not being tabulated until Nov. 3.
If ballots are damaged or unscannable, they will enter the adjudication step, where teams ensure the voter’s choice is correctly recorded by the voting system.
All ballots are stored for 22 months after an election.
Voters have until 8 p.m. Nov. 3. to mail or return their ballots to an official drop box. Ballots must be received by Nov. 10 to be counted.