“Those ballots will be counted at the end of the evening in the county’s elections department.
. . .
By putting the ballots in a secure box rather than scanning them on site, officials hope to cut down on the number of optical scanners it will need to buy for the next election cycle.”
I can tell them from experince it will take all day to run 5,000 ballots through a scanner. This is done every election in Portland, ME for the absentee (early voting) ballots. They start running them through the machines on Monday and finish on Tuesday afternoon and then run the final 100 or so on Tuesday night (ballots that have come in during the day via mail or walk in).
“By putting the ballots in a secure box rather than scanning them on site, officials hope to cut down on the number of optical scanners it will need to buy for the next election cycle”
I think LBJ won a Texas senate seat, when one of these ‘secure boxes’ was lost.