Chicago Board of Elections explains which votes are counted first on election night
CHICAGO (WLS) -- We are six days away from the 2024 general election.
There are several state and local races to watch along with the presidential race.
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We've seen record turnout for early voting in Chicago.
You can cast your ballot now downtown, in all of Chicago's 50 wards and the suburbs.
At last check, nearly 173,000 people have voted in-person and nearly 115,000 people have submitted their mail-in ballots.
There are about 153,000 outstanding ballots that haven't been returned to the Chicago Board of Elections.
On election night, the Election Board will report unofficial results for races.
Max Bever with the Chicago Board of Elections joined ABC7 to talk about how the process works.
Bever said mail-in ballots will start getting processed the weekend before election night and the results will then get counted on election night.
"Those results that we are getting, people's ballots, the choices that they have for president, the choices that they have for state's attorney, those are being collected but they are not being made public. Not even the board has access to those secret ballots at this time. So at 7 p.m., once all the polls are closed and once all of the precinct polling places on Election Day are closed, it's more like a switch is being flipped and all of those ballots that have previously been cast, they are tabulated and put into your precinct results."
Bever said those votes will be the earliest reported on election night.
Bever said mail-in ballots coming back on Monday and after Election Day will get processed in the days following Election Day. Bever said there is a two-week counting period where all properly post-marked ballots will be counted.
