ORLANDO, Fla. – Concerns about voter fraud and voter security have grown since 2020 because of the false belief that the election was rigged.
However, Florida keeps a rigorous standard for how votes are counted, and while each county’s system may vary, they must operate within the framework created by the state, which you can read on the Florida Division of Elections website.
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We asked our county supervisors of elections to walk us through what happens with ballots at polling places, from the machine you submit your ballot into at a precinct, to how your vote gets to the supervisor of elections office, to how it gets recorded and verified.
To find out how Florida secures vote-by-mail ballots, go HERE.
NOTE: Go to your county supervisor of elections website to learn more about the exact methods and machines used in counting the vote. Many have pages dedicated to election security, videos that walk you through the process and also offer public tours of their offices.
Step 1: The voting tabulation machine
When you get to a polling precinct, either on Election Day or during early voting, you will fill out a paper ballot and insert it into an electronic voting system that reads your ballot and tabulates your vote. Florida allows certified voting systems by either Dominion Voting Systems or Election Systems and Software (most of the counties in Central Florida use ES&S machines). You can learn more about the machines on the Florida Division of Elections website.
Each tabulation machine is programmed with a number that is specific to each election and each precinct. Because of this, a ballot that is intended for one precinct can’t be run through a machine for another precinct. It is never connected to the regular internet (we will be saying this a lot).
If the machine can’t read any part of the ballot, it will spit the paper back out and ask the voter if they still want to submit it anyway or fix the ballot. This is why it’s important to only fill in the oval next to your chosen candidate in order to cast your vote. Like the old Scantron sheets for school tests, the machine will only read a filled-in oval as a vote.
When it comes to vote-by-mail ballots, election offices use a central tabulation device that can process the ballots in a continuous ribbon of paper, without someone having to handfeed the machine. If the machine can’t read a ballot, it sets the ballot aside so the election canvassing board can check the ballot and determine voter intent.
Inside the machine is a memory stick, which is tagged with a barcoded zip tie and stored in a locked compartment. The elections office knows which barcode is linked to which machine and which precinct.
That memory stick stores the vote counts.
Step 2: Transmitting the vote
At the end of the day, after the last ballot is submitted, the polling clerk will begin the process of closing the machine down. This encrypts the data.
The process here varies. Many counties we talked to will then connect the machine to a secure network using VPN to transmit the data to the main office. Lake County uses a zero-access tunnel to transmit the data. Marion County, however, hand delivers the data to the office.
In all cases, the data is never connected to the regular internet, and for those that use VPN or a ZAT, it’s only connected to the secure network for a brief period.
The systems that receive the data at the elections offices are also only connected to the secure network.
The data storage is then removed from the machine, placed in a container, and brought back to the office. The equipment, by Florida law, uses a multi-factor authentication to verify who is trying to access it.
On top of this, all of the paper ballots are packed up and taken to the elections office. This way officials have the physical ballot in the event of a recount or audit. Officials have to keep the ballots for at least 22 months after an election.
Step 3: Verifying the vote
The next day, election officials upload the data from the memory stick to an office computer and verify that the data on the stick is identical to the data that was transmitted the previous night.
Then, after each election, the county must perform a voting system audit to make sure the equipment accurately recorded and counted the votes.
This process is different depending on the county. The state allows the audit to be conducted in one of two ways:
- Manual audit: Officials randomly select a race and do a public hand count of the votes cast in one or more randomly selected precincts.
- Automated audit: Officials can use a computer system to independently tally the votes cast on all ballots from a certain number of precincts (at least 20% of them). For this, 37 counties in Florida use a system called Clear Ballot. The ballots are run through Clear Ballot, and it shows a comparison of how the results of the paper ballot count compare with the data that was transmitted.
We’ve reached out to all of the supervisors of elections offices in Central Florida to get information on their elections. We will post the info below as it comes in. To find the information for a county outside Central Florida, head to the Florida Division of Elections website.
- Brevard County: Brevard County uses ES&S systems for tabulation and Clear Ballot for post-election auditing. Click HERE for details.
- Flagler County: Flagler County uses ES&S systems for tabulation and Clear Ballot for post-election auditing. Click HERE for details.
- Lake County: Lake County uses ES&S systems for tabulation and Clear Ballot for post-election auditing. Click HERE for details.
- Marion County: Marion County hand counts ballots for post-election auditing. Click HERE for details.
- Orange County: Orange County uses ES&S systems for tabulation and Clear Ballot for post-election auditing. Orange County also has a live stream during elections so that the public can watch ballot processing.
- Osceola County: Osceola County uses ES&S systems for tabulation and Clear Ballot for post-electing auditing. Click HERE for details.
- Seminole County: Seminole County uses ES&S systems for tabulation and hand counts ballots for post-election auditing. Click HERE for details.
- Volusia County: Volusia County hand counts ballots for post-election auditing. Click HERE for details.
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