When the polls close on Election Day and no more voting is allowed, the election judge at each polling place has poll workers seal all the ballot boxes.<br /><br />The boxes are sent to a central vote-counting facility. This is usually a government office, such as a city hall or county courthouse.<br /><br />There, if paper ballots are still used, election officials manually read each ballot and add up the number of votes in each race. <br /><br />Where punch-card ballots are used, election officials count the ballots by hand, then run them through a mechanical punch card reader, which prints out a tally.<br /><br />For absentee/mail-in ballots, they're first cross-checked against voter registration records, to ensure there's no fraud taking place.<br /><br />On Election Day—but never before—state election officials count the mail-in ballots, and add the tally to the ballots cast in-person.<br /><br />With newer, fully computerized voting systems, the vote totals are transmitted automatically, or via removable digital media, to the central counting facility.
