Ballots can come into the Election Center one of three ways through one of our 18 secure drop boxes behind me.

Or they can come in via the United States Postal Service, or they can come in through in-person voting at one of four Anchorage vote centers.

As ballots come into our election center.

They are sorted through our sorter system here so that as they get sorted, this can take an image of the voter signature and check the voter off the voter list.

Once a image is taken, it is then sent to our signature verification team who are trained by professional document forensic experts will look at the voter signature and compare it to the signatures that we have on file from the State of Alaska Division of Elections.

The envelope opening team will start removing the batches of ballots that have been sorted twice from this cage.

They will then bring the batches to their table where two people will work together to disassemble these in a way where the voter's information remains confidential.

Those ballots then get put into another cage ready for scanning.

Once the ballots are all scanned in, they're then put in our vault where they will remain for the rest of the election.

Once the ballots are scanned, we begin what's called adjudication.

This is just another means of ensuring that people's votes get counted if there are any ambiguities that are on the ballots themselves.

One of the highlights of this system, as well as the system for sorting and signature verification, is they are air gapped, which means they are not connected to the network whatsoever.