Can Philadelphia’s ballot counters outrun election lies?

The room where it happens has metal beams and harsh overhead lighting. Paper whizzes through conveyor belts on large gears near tall, human-sized cages with keypad locks. 

Though it resembles one, this is not a factory. It's Philadelphia's mail-in ballot-counting facility, where somewhere around 200,000 votes are expected to be tallied beginning on Election Day. The longer that tally takes, the more misinformation could seep into a deep well of paranoia and distrust over the democratic process - one that overflowed four years ago in a violent attack on the US Capitol.

The stakes, you could say, are high.

Pennsylvania's 19 electoral votes could decide whether former President Donald Trump or Vice President Kamala Harris wins the 2024 presidential election. Many of the state's ballots have already been cast through the mail. Yet Pennsylvania's laws prohibit even beginning to process mail-in ballots until 7AM on Election Day. The result can be a serious delay in reporting election results - in 2020, The Associated Press didn't call Pennsylvania as having been won by Joe Biden until four days after Election Day.

The state's solution is a downright industrial ballot-counting process, which elected officials invited reporters to preview (using test ballots for demonstration purposes) in late October. It's a highly regimented process that takes place in a sprawling warehouse in northeast Philadelphia, filled with the sounds of whirring ballot-sorting machines and the constant rifling of paper. On Election Day, workers will open hundreds of thousands of mailed ballots and feed them into machines that read and count them, keeping a careful eye on monitors flagging any irregularities. The scanned ballots will also be watched by election observers from each political party. "We do it right," says Philadelphia City Commissioners chair Omar Sabir, a Democrat. 

The city's press tour is part of a broader effort to educate voters and reassure them that voting is safe, secure, and trustworthy. It's an attempted bulwark against false claims about ballots being inaccurately tallied, flipped, or destroyed to skew election results.

Lisa Deeley, Democratic vice chair of the Philadelphia City Commissioners, says she doesn't expect as long of a delay as 2020. Mail-in voting was an unusually popular option that year due to the ongoing covid-19 pandemic. But when conspiracies can ricochet across social media in seconds, every hour counts. "The more people hear things, unfortunately, the more inclined they are to believe them," she says.

As Deeley explains, election workers are "starting from brick one" on Election Day. That means not just tallying who votes for whom, but reviewing the signatures on sealed envelopes, removing them from their secrecy sleeves, and flattening the ballots themselves. Commissioners have been "begging" for reforms to this process, Deeley says. Absent these changes, they're left with technical and procedural solutions like buying new equipment and relying on more experienced election workers - shaving time off the clock any way they can.

"We know that the eyes of the world are going to be on Philadelphia," City Commissioner Seth Bluestein, a Republican, told reporters gathered in the warehouse. "We are going to run the safest, most secure election in Philadelphia history." 

The process of tallying ballots - as I and other reporters see, shuffling behind Sabir around the 360,000-square-foot room - starts with what looks like an oversized Xerox machine. It feeds ballots in sealed envelopes into a conveyor belt on two gears and spits them out across a long track, sorting them into different slots based on ward and division. The machine scans barcodes on the envelopes, each one linked to a registered voter's ID to mark the ballots as "received" so one voter can't send multiple votes. If it was mailed without a signature or not placed in its included secrecy envelope, it's set aside and added to a list that voters can check, letting them correct the problem with a replacement ballot. 

This is as far as workers can get before Election Day, so the sorted envelopes go into secure storage until the morning of November 5th. Then, at the crack of dawn, the count begins. Twenty-two envelope extractors, built around desks where workers will help separate the envelopes from their contents once opened, run about 1,000 envelopes each per hour. Four rapid slicing machines open the yellow secrecy envelopes inside those envelopes at a rate of about 10,000 per hour. Workers remove the ballots from the now-opened secrecy envelopes - and since this process is separated from when the ballots are removed from their outer envelopes, it ensures votes stay anonymous. Now patted flat, the ballots reach the step this whole process is building up to: the count.

An election scanner is basically a gigantic Scantron machine, with a stretched-out metal S-shape that ballots glide through as the machine reads the marks voters have made. This warehouse has eight high-speed scanners, each one expected to check about 2,500 ballots per hour. (Four additional slower scanners can read 1,000 per hour.) Some ballots can't be read - if they've been marked with a light-colored pen or had mistakes erased with Wite-Out, for instance. A staff of nonpartisan civil servants review these and mark the voter's choices onto replacement ballots, which can then be scanned.

Election observers - who are selected by each party - will watch screens showing the ballots to help ensure everything is adjudicated fairly. Finally, the processed ballots go into another locked storage area. They will ultimately be kept in long-term storage for the 22 months mandated by law - just in case they're needed for a recount. 

As this count is taking place, an opposing process will be spinning up: a disinformation apparatus that aims to convince voters the election is being rigged.

In 2020, this process coalesced into the "Stop the Steal" election denial movement, culminating in an attempt to overturn the election of President Joe Biden by force. In 2024, it's already gotten started. A group of Republicans including House Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA), who voted to sustain objections to the 2020 election results, sued Pennsylvania's state government, demanding military and overseas ballots be set aside because of what election experts call unfounded doubts about the process. (It was also recently tossed by a judge.) Election deniers have gained seats on important state and local bodies that could give them leverage over election certification. And online, Trump mega-donor Elon Musk has set up an X community for reporting "voter fraud and irregularities," which has already filled up with unfounded claims. 

For Philadelphia's City Commissioners, misinformation is personal. Sabir smiles as he relates one of the "craziest" conspiracy theories: a blog post that claimed he was personally taking ballots to a mobster in Atlantic City, New Jersey, to be destroyed. (It's not clear why the mobster needs them trucked out more than 60 miles just to be shredded.) "We're not doing crazy stuff. We're just trying to come to do our job for the American people," Sabir says.

The threats aren't always amusing. Bluestein told The Verge that, while ballots were being counted in 2020, he received antisemitic threats. The harassment got so bad that Bluestein had police protection at his house the week of the election.

So far, "the heat is down" in 2024, he says. But election officials around the country are still on high alert. In Maricopa County in Arizona, another swing state, an official recently said security will be available to escort election workers to their cars. The state is also preparing for cutting-edge risks like infiltration by artificial intelligence scams, a scenario the staff roleplayed last year.

Bluestein himself is trying to spot and call out false information online. In one case, he debunked an allegation - shared on X by Musk - that a nonprofit offering services to low-income and houseless individuals harvested thousands of mail-in ballots from one address. (Bluestein says "fewer than 150 ballots" were mailed there in 2020.)

His active role online is partially because he feels that social media platforms "are not doing as good a job as they did in 2020" with combating misinformation. Four years ago, platforms were on high alert for false claims, even if they often failed to enforce their policies effectively. In 2024, the situation is different. Under pressure from Trump and his allies to take a more hands-off role when it comes to election misinformation, many tech companies have relaxed the policies they had in place last time around. Meta and YouTube both rolled back rules against false claims that the 2020 election was stolen, and both Meta and X have made it more difficult for researchers on their platforms to access data used to monitor emerging threats.

At the same time, both Bluestein and Sabir say they haven't yet seen the same level of targeted harassment and threats. Bluestein says broader misinformation claims are circulating, but he hasn't found as many claims that single out specific officials or rank-and-file workers. Despite harassment in 2020, he says Philadelphia had no problem recruiting poll workers or staffers at the warehouse. "I think everyone understands the importance of this work, and they understand that while there could be risks associated with it, they're all signing up to do the job."

Misinformation often picks at tensions that already exist. Black Americans, for example, are already a group commonly targeted by disenfranchisement efforts, which Sabir says results in "misconceptions about 'my vote doesn't count.'" Add disinformation to that, and Sabir says it drives a notion through this community of "What am I doing? Why am I wasting my time?" 

Bluestein has found that he can persuade voters through one-on-one conversations. But during that time, false claims can reach millions of voters online. "When you scale that up to build trust, it's a lot harder," Bluestein says. "But when you really tell people the facts and show them, they will have more faith."

While election officials try to persuade skeptics, election deniers have increased their attacks against the administration of the voting process itself. In 2020, election deniers "used violent rhetoric as the means to suppress the vote and make it harder for folks to vote, or make the voting process seem scary and intimidating," says Deborah Hinchey, Pennsylvania state director for the nonpartisan nonprofit All Voting is Local. This year, she is seeing election deniers use "administrative tactics to do the same thing - to suppress the vote, to make it seem an intimidating and overwhelming process, and to make folks feel like their vote may not be counted."

But Hinchey says those efforts will fail. In 2020, Trump lawyers and other allies brought numerous cases to change the election results after the fact. Those suits invariably fizzled, and some of the lawyers who filed them have been sanctioned or disbarred. "The analysis now seems to be, 'Well, then let's go directly for the votes themselves, and discredit certain kinds of voters and make it seem like certain people are voting that are not, so that we can then attack all votes.'"

So far, these attempts largely haven't panned out. While right-wing activists throughout Pennsylvania have sought to challenge voter registrations, they've proven unsuccessful or identified inactive voters election officials already knew about. 

As for trust, a September Spotlight PA poll by MassINC Polling Group found that 63 percent of respondents were very or somewhat confident that votes in the presidential race would be counted accurately and fairly nationally. But voters had far more confidence in how elections in their own counties would be administered - 78 percent expressed confidence in the results.

Organizers are seeing more people wanting to get involved in the process of democracy, and that participation can help quell election fears, says Susan Gobreski, president of the League of Women Voters of Philadelphia. While hearing about election skeptics getting involved in the process might raise some red flags, Gobreski says it's important to remember that "most people are actually acting in good faith."

Arming the public and the press with trustworthy information is a smart move, says Hinchey. "You can't dispel all bad information with good information, but you can make sure that organizations and the press have a really good understanding of how elections are actually functioning in Pennsylvania," she says. Gobreski encourages voters to ask questions but also to "be prepared to listen to the answers."

Ultimately, Hinchey adds, most voters are just looking for reliable information. "The average Pennsylvania voter is looking for the facts of the situation, and may take in the falseness, but when presented with facts, is going to accept that as reality."

There's one final option on the table for ballot tallies: a hand count. It's common to audit samples of ballots by hand and compare them to machine results, confirming the machines are working properly. (Election officials also do preelection testing of equipment to make sure they're properly calibrated, often on livestreams.) But in states like Georgia, election skeptics have - so far, unsuccessfully - pushed for full hand counts of every ballot. That's a recipe for mistakes and delays.

Hand-counting has an important role in auditing elections, says Pennsylvania Secretary of the Commonwealth Al Schmidt, a Republican. "But if you're just counting by hand, you don't have anything to compare it against. So when people do significant numbers of hand counting, that's where you see more errors." Compared to machine counts, it's also a glacial process. "If people are unhappy with how long they wait now, imagine how long" it would take without the machinery to get results, says Deeley. "It's [like] going to Nabisco and having them make all the cookies by scratch."

On Election Day, the machines in Philadelphia's warehouse will flip on, rifling through thousands and thousands of envelopes, slicing and scanning. Signatures will be checked and folded. Paper will be flattened. The work of democracy will run through machines and careful human hands. It's a tedious process, but it's also one that's at the very heart of the American experiment. Each ballot counted is one step closer to determining if Pennsylvania will be colored in red or blue on TV screens across the country - and possibly determining the next president. And although every minute after polls close is another minute for spreading doubt in America's electoral system, Philadelphia's officials are resolute.

"Philadelphia is the birthplace of democracy," says Sabir. "I'll be damned if democracy dies here."