What happens to your ballot after you vote?

From scanning to re-scanning and signature verification, following your ballot on the road to being counted.

It is Election Day in Washington state. We'll have to wait for returns to answer big questions like: Will the state have a Republican U.S. Senator for the first time since 2001? Who will win the tight 8th District House race? How many people will bother voting for those unopposed state Supreme Court justices?

While we wait for the answers to those questions, election officials can say how many people have voted so far and what election officials are watching. In Spokane County, elections officials are projecting a slightly lower percentage of turnout from the 2018 midterm election, but an increase in the total number of voters.

"We were about 13,000 ballots behind 2018, but that's starting to pick up," says Mike McLaughlin, Spokane County's elections manager. "We're still predicting about 240,000 ballots returned."

If it's before 8 p.m., there is still time to vote.

"If you have your ballot, I would recommend dropping it off in the post office, just checking the last pickup time or using a drop box," McLaughlin says.

He says once the ballot is first scanned for eligibility, the voter signature is cropped out and sent to be verified. There's another sorting based on that signature verification, then the ballot is separated from the security envelope, it's reviewed, then it goes into the final processing, and finally, after all those steps, it is tabulated.

McLaughlin spoke to Soundside about what he's seeing in Spokane County and what happens to a ballot after it is placed in a drop box or in the mail.