Polls are open until 9:00 p.m. this election day in 812 reporting districts across Monroe County, representing about half-a-million people.
Bipartisan teams of workers from the Monroe County Board of Elections (and the other counties surrounding Rochester) have verified the ballots and programming loaded into each individual voting machine sent to those election districts, each signing off on the other’s work.
Once the results are collected from the machines and reported after the polls close, we get the preliminary results. A post-election audit is then done in the following days. Again, joint Republican and Democratic teams pull about three percent of the voting machines at random and hand count the paper ballots that are sucked into and stored in each machine to make sure they match the electronic count. That’s about 20,000 sheets of paper in a presidential year.
The verification process is open to the public, and candidates frequently come to watch it.