MCLENNAN COUNTY, Texas — Once you've cast your ballot, you may wonder if your vote was counted and accurately recorded. You can check if your vote is in the system just by using your computer.
McLennan County elections administrator explains that voting systems are vetted at the federal and state level.
- Logic and accuracy testing are conducted before and after elections to ensure votes are counted correctly.
- This involves feeding test ballots through scanners and comparing the results to known outcomes.
- The Secretary of State has a webpage to view if your vote was counted.
BROADCAST TRANSCRIPT:
The early voting numbers are in—McLennan County had a total of 73,231 early voters, Bell County had 96,480 early voters, and Brazos County had 71,761 early voters.
There’s a simple way for you to find out if your vote was counted.
The Texas Secretary of State has a webpage for election information and turnout data. Once you are there, you’ll select the “2024 November 5th general election.” Next, you’ll choose the day you voted early and click submit. Then, you scroll down to your county and download the “click here” option. That’s when you search for your name.
This method shows if your vote was counted, but it doesn’t show who you voted for. Elections administrator Jared Goldsmith explained how the Elections office ensures your vote is counted correctly.
“We have a test deck of ballots that are marked a certain way, and we know how those ballots are marked, and we feed them through various scanners that we use during an election, and then we take the electronic results that those scanners have counted and then we compare them,” said Elections Administrator Jared Goldsmith.
Goldsmith said thousands of ballots are tested before early voting, and all their machines tally them correctly. They run another test on election night. For extra certainty, they do a partial manual count.
“The secretary of state will give us certain contests to review, and then we have a team that hand counts on the paper ballots the voters have voted, and then we view those hand-counted tallies with the electronic counts to make sure that everything matches, and they always do match,” said Goldsmith.
Another way to find out if your vote was counted is to visit your city’s website. It should have a list that could be labeled as “list of early voters” or “election roster.”
Brazos County early voter list
McLennan County early voter list
