SPRINGFIELD, Mass. (WGGB/WSHM) – As election night approaches on Tuesday, we have answers about how your vote moves from the ballot box to the ballot that is officially counted.

After casting your vote, we learned that it is a multi-step process to make sure your vote counts.

As lines begin to shorten and polls begin to close at the end of election day, some may wonder what the next step will be.

City clerks across the Bay State will have a long, busy night as they close polling places and count votes.

UMass Amherst political science professor Ray La Raja said there are five tasks municipal clerks must complete after the polls close, the first of which is ballot box closing procedures.

“They need to ensure that everyone who is online at closing time votes and officially close the polling stations,” he said.

Step two: Count the votes; including in-person and absentee voting.

“Now Massachusetts, they can start counting those in advance, in some states like Pennsylvania, we may not know about the elections there for a while because they can’t officially start counting them until the polls close.”

Step three: Report the results.

“They take the vote totals from each ballot box, report to a central location, usually to the Secretary of State, as here in Massachusetts.”

Step four: Verify and confirm the results.

“In some cases, they often have to count some places where the votes do not match exactly and some irregularities are suspected.”

Step 5: Officially confirm the votes.

“Once the votes are counted, election officials say these are our official counts, which Massachusetts reports as our final result,” La Raja concluded.

Typically, Massachusetts gets its final vote count fairly quickly, but some battleground states, such as Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, may experience more delays than others before total counts are officially received.

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