GREENVILLE, SC (FOX Carolina) – Although the race for the White House is over, the results we are seeing now are not official until they are certified by the counties, states and, eventually, the Commission federal election.

“We want the public to have full confidence in what we do and how we do it,” said Conway Belangia, director of elections and voter registration at Greenville Countysaid.

He explained that the path to vote certification takes time but is vital. As voters headed home at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Belangia’s team got to work. “Every vote counts, and we want to make sure that if a vote is going to count, it will,” he added.

The process begins before your “I voted” gets even sicker. As your ballot is sent to the scanner, it compiles the results which are then saved to an encrypted USB drive.

“What we do is go back and check the numbers that came out of the USB drive against the totals that were printed out at the station to make sure everything was okay,” Belangia said.

State officials also randomly select several precincts to manually count their votes against the scanner results.

“We’re talking about potentially thousands of ballots to be counted manually, and it’s not an easy process, it’s time-consuming and painstaking, but it’s necessary to make sure the system is working properly,” Belangia explained.

To ensure that the system works, provisional ballots must be held. If a voter showed up and their name did not appear on the precinct’s voter registration list, they received a provisional ballot, which was set aside in a separate envelope to be searched.

“Provisional ballots could tip a close election. »

If a person voted in the wrong precinct, by law their vote does not count.

“But if someone shows up to vote and they just haven’t voted in 20 years; and they voted, and we find out “oh yeah, they were registered a long time ago and they haven’t moved”, we’ll count their ballot.

TJ Lundeen, Director of Public Information and Outreach for the State Election Commissionsaid the state is sending nearly two dozen workers to each county to help on Election Day.

“There are many measures in place, all defined by state law to ensure that every election is conducted the same way and that we all follow each step to the letter of the law,” he added.

Below South Carolina lawall 46 counties must certify votes the Friday after Election Day by 1 p.m.

This year, counties must certify votes by Friday, November 8. Once the Friday deadline passes, counties then send their results to the State Election Commission via an encrypted website.

South Carolina will certify all state votes by Wednesday, November 14.

All states must certify votes by December 11 and send results to Congress by December 17.

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