As of Monday night, 42 percent of registered North Carolina voters had cast their ballots. Johnnie McLean, deputy director for the state’s Board of Elections, said she’s hoping for 40 percent more.

That puts 80 percent of North Carolinia’s voters — about 5 million — at the polls.

But once voters have handed their ballots to polling employees, pressed “Cast vote” on electronic voting machines or sealed the envelopes on their absentee ballots, McLean said their votes take two journeys.

“There’s not a great deal of exciting mystery in that,” she said.

One, via a modem, delivers votes quickly to the Board of Elections office. Polling employees hand deliver the other, printed on tapes McLean said resemble those in cash registers, to the office.

Both serve the same purpose: to bring all voters’ choices to the same place. It is here where, tonight, North Carolina will be preliminarily deemed a red or blue state.

The trip

“Once the voter verifies that the votes are what they wanted and they do the ‘Cast vote’ on the touch-screen machine, the screen goes blank,” McLean said. “And then it says ‘Thank you for voting.’ That says your vote has been recognized.”

For those who are going to a polling place where paper ballots are issued, once voters issue their ballots into what McLean called a tabulator — a machine that “simply reads the votes and records them and, with the proper command, tabulates them” — which scans and records votes “in the electronic brains of the machines” as they come in.

“It’s as if you were making little tick marks — one, two, three, four and a crosshatch to five — it’s similar to that. It records each vote and they just sit there until the machine is told to tabulate those votes,” McLean said. “The machine doesn’t care who wins or who loses.”

Polling employees will commence and oversee tabulation of each of the location’s machines once polls close at 7:30 p.m. tonight. McLean said this process could take anywhere from 30 minutes to two hours.

The 2,597,884 votes cast during the early voting period will be counted from 2 to 4 p.m. today — votes were recorded, but will not be tabulated until all other votes are in.

Employees must go in and hand-tabulate write-in votes. They add in these results with the others, marking each candidate’s totals on voting machines’ tapes along with the final voting results from that polling place.

Ensuring your vote is your vote

Each machine has undergone a series of tests McLean said ensures they are operating correctly.

“We have issued several procedures to the county boards of election that are followed,” McLean said. “These measure the security of machines before they are sent out to voting places.”

Before electronic voting machines are relocated from climate-controlled storage to polling places, McLean said the Board of Elections performs a testing procedure in which employees test ballots to ensure they are correctly recorded and tabulated.

The Board of Elections also looks over ballots before and after they are distributed.

Final election results

“The results that you will see [tonight] are unofficial,” McLean said. “I don’t care what they say on the national news, I don’t care how many winners they project — it’s still unofficial.”

She said although the spreadsheet the Board of Elections compiles from polling places’ final tabulations dictates preliminary results, the state’s results will be made official Nov. 14.

“Two tapes come from each machine,” McLean said. “Both have to match. They will compare those later on. They won’t do it [to]night.”

Once they have confirmed the tapes match, employees will compare those results to the ones sent by a modem.