Voting in Juneau’s municipal election will wrap up Tuesday when vote centers and drop boxes close at 8 p.m.
Four Assembly seats, two school board seats and a voter proposition asking whether to fund a new city hall are all on the ballot this year.
But since by-mail elections take longer to tally, we won’t know who won for up to two weeks. That’s because the city’s election staff needs to allow time for all of the mailed ballots to arrive. They also need time to verify ballot signatures and to go through multiple rounds of tabulation to ensure accuracy.
What happens
All of the ballots submitted before Election Day will be scanned and counted on Tuesday night, after voting ends.
“Starting on Election Night at 8 p.m., we will actually start to scan those ballots and adjudicate them,” said City Clerk Beth McEwen. “Adjudication means we’re going to actually have human eyes on those ballots, looking to make sure the machine counted the vote the way the ballot appears to have been cast.”
The city expects to post those preliminary election results after 10 p.m. on Tuesday.
After that, election workers will continue processing ballots that were submitted on Election Day or that continue to arrive by mail. They’ll also address any issues with the ballots.
“If there are issues – like it’s missing a signature or there’s no reference signature, or there’s no personal identifier – if there’s any reason for a challenge, then that goes into a separate process,” McEwen said.
That process involves sending a cure letter to a voter with instructions on what they need to do to get their ballot counted.
The city will post updated results a few times until the Canvass Review Board certifies election results on Tuesday, Oct. 17.
Last year’s Election Night results included 4,834 ballots, compared with 9,137 ballots in the final results.
How to submit your ballot on time
Voting has been taking place since mid-September, when ballots were mailed out to voters. If you haven’t voted yet, McEwen recommends dropping ballots off in one of the city’s drop boxes — at Statter Harbor or the Douglas Library — or at the City Hall or Mendenhall Valley Library vote centers.
If voters still plan to mail their ballots on Tuesday, McEwen says they should do it early. Ballots returned by mail must be postmarked by Election Day to get counted.
“It could be the post office isn’t going to actually process that until the next day, and your postmark isn’t going to be until the next day,” she said.
And if Juneau voters plan to vote in person on Tuesday, McEwen said, “go early.”
“You may be waiting in line,” she said. “We had a lot of time with nobody coming during the two weeks leading up to Election Day, but we anticipate long lines, maybe a longer wait, on Election Day. That tends to be the Juneau trend.”
If you make a mistake while filling out your ballot, you can visit a vote center to request a replacement. The same thing goes if you’ve completed your ballot and want to change something but have not yet returned it. But if you’ve already sent in your completed ballot, it’s too late to change it now.
How to witness the count
Anyone who wants to witness the ballot counting process can visit the city’s ballot processing center at 1325 Eastaugh Way off of Thane Road. The center opened last year so ballots could be tabulated in Juneau instead of going to Anchorage. Visitors must remain in the public viewing area.
Find stories on all the races on this year’s ballot along with candidate profiles and other election information at ktoo.org/elections.
