With half of Lancaster County voting early, election workers busy preparing ballots

LINCOLN, Neb. (KLKN) – Lancaster County election officials are working hard to prepare around 40,000 mail-in ballots before sending them back to voters next week.

Election Commissioner Todd Wiltgen said half of the county’s voters cast their votes early — either by mail or in person.

He said getting the ballots ready is an intricate process.

The office mailed blue postcards in July to 60,000 voters who were on the early absentee list. Those postcards informed voters on how to request an early ballot.

The ballot requests the election office gets back are assigned a tracking number so voters can keep an eye on their ballot’s progress.

Election workers then go through the requests to make sure the voter is registered, has valid identification and has signed the ballot request.

“Every one of those is manually being verified,” Wiltgen said, “We’re checking signatures, driver’s license numbers, state ID numbers and making sure they tell us where they want their ballot sent.”

He said if there is a problem with a request, it’s set aside in bins that organize the requests by the problem. There’s one for requests with a signature missing and another for address discrepancies, to name a few.

Then, the ballot request gets sent back to the voter to fix those problems.

The requests that are approved get a ballot with a matching label. That way, the voter gets the right ballot sent to them.

“All that is done as a double check before any ballot is mailed out,” Wiltgen said.

Once everything is checked, the ballot, instructions and a return envelope are put together and will be sent to voters starting next Monday.

When the office gets the ballots back, two people of different parties date stamp and check the ballots to make sure everything is correct.

Ballots need to be returned either by mail or in person at a drop box by 8 p.m. on Election Day, which is Tuesday, Nov. 5.

Wiltgen said the votes are counted on Election Day.

“The first release of election results will be early vote ballots, and that will be comprised of both people who voted in office early as well as people who voted by mail,” he said.

Early in-person voting begins Oct. 7.

The last day to request a mail-in ballot is Oct. 25.