By Bill Oelfke & Meredith Marcinkewicz

The Annual Town Election of May 5, 2015 was the first election in the Town of Shirley to utilize our current Imagecast Precinct Optical Scan Tabulator machine. This replaced the Hand Crank Ballot boxes that were used for over 250 years.

Currently the voter totals from each election in the Town of Shirley are calculated by pushing a few buttons on the Imagecast Precinct Optical Scan Tabulator, which generates a paper tape report of the election results of each race that is on the ballot. This machine is just a tabulator that reads the marks made on the ballot. It is not hooked up to the internet. This process can take 10-15 minutes at the most.

When the Town of Shirley utilized the Hand Crank Ballot boxes, the process to determine the vote totals from each race on the ballot was a lot more complex. At the close of election (8 p.m.), the election worker volunteers would gather in the voting area to hand count each ballot submitted during the Election Day. There would be up to 10-20 Election Workers sitting at tables in the room, in teams of two sitting across from each other.   

The first step of the process was for a “runner” to give the Election Workers the ballots, one pile after another, for the Election Workers to count out into piles of 50 and give them back to the “runner.”

The “runner” would then give out a tally sheet to one person of the team, with all the races and names of candidates or ballot questions on it and give a stack of 50 ballots to the other team member sitting across from his/her team member.   

The Election Worker with the ballots would then read the results of the first ballot, race by race, to the other Election Worker with the tally sheet who would put a mark next to the candidate that got that person’s vote, and on and on for the remaining 50 ballots of that pile.  That team would then add up the vote totals for each candidate for each race for those 50 ballots on that tally sheet and hand them to the Lead Tally Person who would write down the results from each team’s 50 ballots onto a single tally sheet.  This process was occurring for each team of Election Workers. After each team was done with their first 50 ballots, they were given the next 50, and so on. This repeated until all ballots were counted and tallied by one of the teams and given to the Lead Tally Person, who would then generate the total vote counts for each race for the entire election. This process could take up to three-six hours depending on the number of voters that voted at that election.

As of noon on August 27th, we received 332 mail-in votes and 81 early voting walk-in ballots. These are currently locked up in the town vault and will be run through the Imagecast machine on election day. Note that the state determines how many days and hours for early voting are required, depending on the number of voters in the town. Town Clerk Bill Oelfke expects 500 – 700 of them to vote in person on Tuesday, September 1st.