By Marlene, volunteer observer and co-lead of Indivisible Honolulu
Every mail-in ballot cast in Hawaiʻi passes through a series of checks before it's ever counted. This election cycle, I volunteered as an official observer with the Office of Elections to see that process firsthand — not because I doubted our elections were secure, but because I wanted to know exactly how that security works. After several days inside the State Capitol's ballot-counting operation, my answer is simple: seeing is believing. Security is built into every single step.
Inside the ballot-sorting room
It's not a large conference room. To a first-time observer, what's happening looks like barely controlled chaos. From one corner, a desktop-printer-sized machine emits a continuous whirring and hissing sound. At least eight young men and women in black polo shirts carry long plastic trays filled with ballot envelopes, striding hurriedly between the machine and rows of tables, where four women in nitrile gloves wait for the envelopes to be set in front of them. In another corner, half a dozen people sit waiting, though it's not immediately clear for what. Finally, eight or ten more people in green t-shirts stand around watching everything intently, careful to stay out of the way of the black-shirted workers.
This is the room where voted ballots arrive to be sorted and made ready for scanning.
How ballots move from mailbox to the Hawaiʻi State Capitol
Signature verification happens at the county level
The first step in the process, signature verification, is a county function, not a state one, so I had no visibility into it myself. What I know is that it takes place "at the [Honolulu] airport," in a fairly small and cramped space. Signatures on the ballot envelopes are compared against what's on file with the county (from driver's licenses, state IDs, and other official sources). If a signature doesn't match, the voter is contacted and has up to five days after the election to "cure," or fix, the ballot.
Unsealing the ballot cage
Once verified, ballot envelopes are trucked to the Hawaiʻi State Capitol in flat cardboard boxes inside a sealed metal "cage." As soon as the cage arrives, all doors to the room are closed and a sheriff's deputy is posted outside. Unsealing it requires an Office of Elections (OE) manager to sign the "Certification of Unsealing" portion of the county's Seal Certification form — a process witnessed and signed by two official observers. Then the controlled chaos begins.
Sorting and opening ballots
Ballot envelopes are opened by machine and placed in long plastic trays that OE workers carry to one of eight tables. The first task is sorting the envelopes by district range — 10s, 20s, 30s, and so on — into separate piles. The envelopes themselves are set aside once the secrecy sleeve and ballot are removed, because they must be saved for 22 months in case of any discrepancy between the number of envelopes and the number of ballots. The secrecy sleeve is discarded once the ballot is out. The ballot then goes through its first unfolding and straightening.
OE workers place the unfolded ballots into labeled boxes called VBCs (Voted Ballot Containers), each marked with a 3-digit number and a district range. The now-empty envelopes go through a step called "clearing the envelopes," where volunteers double-check that no secrecy sleeve or ballot was accidentally left behind. It happens occasionally, but rarely, and amounts to a tiny number overall. The speed and efficiency of the whole operation is impressive to watch.
Once enough VBCs are ready, an OE worker loads them onto a cart bound for the Capitol's Chamber level. Two official observers must accompany the worker and the ballots the entire way. A single VBC can hold anywhere from a couple hundred ballots to 700 or 800 or more.
Inside the scanning room
We were warned ahead of time that the Chamber is cold. Not Hawaiʻi cold — one afternoon the thermostat actually read 48°F. Presumably it keeps the scanners running at peak condition.
Five scanning stations sit in a semicircular area with clear access and exit points. Each station has a scanner and a printer, and only technicians from Hart InterCivic, the voting system vendor, are allowed inside the semicircle.
Weighing and preparing ballots for scanning
As boxes of ballots arrive in the Chamber, they're logged manually — 3-digit number, district range, date, and time — and then weighed. Because the weight of a single ballot is a known quantity, elections officials can estimate, to within a few ballots, exactly how many are in each VBC just from its weight. That number is logged and later checked against the actual count from scanning.
A different group of volunteers than the ones in the conference room then takes the ballots out of the VBCs and rolls them lengthwise, like rolling dough, to flatten and straighten them further. The nearly flat ballots pass through a straightening machine to remove any remaining creases before they're scanned.
How scanners catch problems
The scanners work at incredible speed, with a continuous whop-whop sound as ballots seem to fly through. With no rejected ballots, scanning a few hundred takes five to seven minutes. They're also remarkably precise: during one afternoon I observed, it took three experienced observers several minutes each to spot the tiny speck in one of the four square corner markers on a rejected ballot. Another ballot was rejected for handwriting in the margin, which isn't allowed.
Rejected ballots are considered defective and go through a process called duplication. An OE worker clearly labels the rejected ballot as defective and creates a new electronic ballot with the same selections. Both the original and the duplicate get matching control numbers stamped on them, and each is stored, sealed, and secured separately — the defective ballot in its own container, the duplicate in its own VBC.
Sealing ballots after scanning
Each batch of scanned ballots gets a Batch Report, rubber-banded around it. A small detail I appreciated: each workstation prints its report on a different color of paper, for easy identification. Scanned ballots go back into their original VBC, and the Hart technician completes the scanned label on the box. The results are also written to a portable drive, called a vDrive, which is sealed and stored the same way the scanned ballots are.
Once every ballot is scanned and safely stored — including any duplicates, secured in their own VBC — all the VBCs go into a metal cage, sealed with a Certification of Sealing form signed by an OE manager and two official observers.
At this point, the ballots have been scanned, but not yet tabulated. That happens on Election Night.
A note on scope: what I observed applies to mail-in ballots. I didn't see what happens at Voter Service Centers, so I can't report on that process firsthand, though I understand they send their recorded voting data to the Ballot Counting Center on the same kind of portable vDrives that the scanning workstations produce.
A surprising sight: Hawaiʻi's chief elections officer in the trenches
I wasn't assigned to observe on Election Day or Election Night, which I imagine is reserved for more experienced observers. But as a first-timer, one thing surprised me more than anything else: Chief Elections Officer Scott Nago wasn't just present on the days I observed — he was working right in the middle of it. Taking ballots out of secrecy sleeves. Unfolding them. Rolling them flat. Checking random VBCs to make sure they were labeled and sealed correctly. I can't imagine that's a normal task list for a chief elections officer in most states. My respect for the role he plays in Hawaiʻi's elections went up several notches.
Want to see it for yourself?
Every step I watched — from the sealed cage to the sworn certification forms to the color-coded batch reports — exists to make Hawaiʻi's elections verifiable, not just trustworthy on faith. If you've ever wondered how your ballot actually gets counted, the best way to find out is to see it yourself. I volunteered as an official observer, but the counting center also relies on volunteers for ballot opening, duplication, VBC processing, and the audit team, so there's a role no matter what you're up for.
