and received within a week IIRC to be counted. There may also be a time to fix rejected ballot. Ballots then have to checked against list of votes received. A large county may have upwards of 100 ballot types, considering number of cities and council districts for general elections. o not sure if counting machines can handle any ballot they receive or if ballots have to be manually sorted

Volunteers are welcome

...I think I posted something to this effect a few years back, so I apologize if it's redundant.

Generally speaking, no jurisdiction has a legal deadline requiring that all the votes be counted by the day after the election, much less midnight on election day as some candidate out there has suggested. There is a date certain, of course, by which the vote totals must be certified. If they are certified by that date then I am not moved by any passion to insist that they should have been counted sooner. We have been sort of brainwashed by TV networks that have misled many people into thinking that elections are officially called the evening of the election. They are unofficially called by the talking-head pundits; and because we hate to wait for things, want to be satisfied instantly that the matters are settled. It's the American way, I suppose.

in Illinois.

During the last Presidential election, my wife and I voted by mail in Florida.

In all previous elections I have voted in person. To my way of thinking, there are two pieces to voting. First, I tell the volunteers my name. They check to see (a) if there is such a registered voter and (b) if he has already voted. If that test is passsed, they look at my ID. If that looks OK they give me a ballot.

That's piece number one.

I take the ballot over to a booth, fill in the circles I want and put it down the slot where it joins the other ballots.

That's piece number two.

When the polls close, they feed the ballots into the machines and can get a count for that precinct pretty quickly.

For a mail in ballot, I fill in my name and signature on a form which accompanies my filled out ballot. I mailed this in a couple of weeks before election day.

When they receive my envelope, the election officials tear open the envelope and check piece number one at that time. If they decide that there is such a guy, and that he has not yet voted and my signature matches, they place the ballot on a stack which will not be counted until election night.

My impression is that states such as Pennsylvania don't even open the envelopes until the polls close. This is why, in 2020, when there were an extradinary volume of mail ins, the process of counting them was agonzingly slow and Trump yelled as loudly as he could to stop the count while he was ahead and yelled afterward that there was something wrong with mail in ballots.

On the other hand, these votes were counted more quickly in Florida (Florida runs an election right???) because they had completed a signifcant proportion of piece number one before election night.

It may be that the procedure in Illinois is fraudulent. It might also be that it is just slow and mail in voters have a different mix than in person voters.

Assume for a second one could hide an effort to fraudulent add thousands of ballots for one candidate. It certainly doesn’t make sense that one would be able to do it in this situation. The party in the county basically split down the middle in terms of who the officials endorsed. There are people in this office who support both of these candidates. The idea one campaign would be able to secretly add thousands of ballots and would be doing so in a manner that the vote totals mirror somewhat closely the overall results is insanity.

The margin before mail in ballots was like 8500 votes. There were 109,000 mail in ballots and apparently the spokesperson forgot to update the number for ballots received Monday. Which is where the fraud allegation is originating.

As I said in a different post the problem is the people who have been screaming loudest about crime couldn’t find the time to vote. Most of the North side wards where the complaints have been the loudest literally had turnout below 25%. I am good friends with an alderwoman on the NW side with lots of police officers and fire fighters in her ward. 23% of the people voted.

If Williams wins I don’t think he will be as bad as Foxx but 75% of the voters handed their vote to someone else.

Or do we not want that to be the focus?

I do agree that delaying the opening and counting of mail in ballots adds to confusion and delay which engenders mistrust in the system. Pennsylvania should learn from the past but I don’t think they will.