Centre County Government recruited more than 100 volunteers to work at the county's Vote-by-Mail Center on Election Day, and those volunteers got started early Tuesday morning, processing tens of thousands of absentee and mail-in ballots.
The Vote-by-Mail Center, which is being livestreamed on Centre County CNET's YouTube channel throughout Tuesday, is located in the Penn Stater Hotel & Conference Center. Because vote totals cannot be recorded until after polls close at 8 p.m., volunteers and election workers spend the day on what's called pre-canvassing -- tasks such as verifying that the mail-in ballots are present, extracting the envelopes, scanning them for issues and preparing them for the count.
According to Centre County Communications Coordinator JJ De La Cruz, the county issued 26,166 mail-in ballots by the Oct. 29 application deadline, and of those, 23,481 mail-in ballots have been returned so far, with over 450 being returned as of Tuesday afternoon.
Voters who still need to return their mail ballot can bring it to the Willowbank Office Building in Bellefonte until 8 p.m. Tuesday. Any mail-in ballots received after 8 p.m., even if they're postmarked before that point, will not be counted.
Media was not permitted in the Vote-by-Mail Center, but several volunteers spoke to the CDT outside on Tuesday morning. Despite starting their days very early, spirits remained high.
Travis Foster said that he's proud of his volunteer work, and feels that many others should be as well.
"I figured that these mail-in ballots aren't going to process themselves, and the more people we have volunteering, the quicker they get processed and counted, so here I am," Foster said. "I think that the job we're doing here today is pretty important, and I can hold my head high knowing that I did my part."
Two Centre County Elections Specialists told the CDT that they expect all unofficial results of the county's mail-in ballots to be available by the end of the night, given that all continues to go smoothly.
More information about the Vote-by-Mail Center can be found at the Centre County Elections Office's pre-canvassing website.