According to the Secretary of State, as of Sunday, November 3, more than 395,00 voters in Montana had cast their ballots for the 2024 general election. Others spent part of their Monday voting early at county election offices, taking advantage of a one-time absence. Even more will flock to the polls on Tuesday to stand at a booth and fill out bubbles alongside the candidates of their choice.

How exactly do all those ballots turn into the official results that appear on television and computer screens on election night? The answer to that question is what is on the minds of local poll workers well before and well after Election Day. It's also something that has sparked a lot of interest and, at times, skepticism among voters across the state.

At MTFP, where we've been covering election proceedings for years, we spoke with local election officials in Missoula, Gallatin and Lewis and Clark counties to help readers better understand how votes will be counted this week.

For absentee ballots cast by mail and in person, counting is already underway in many parts of the state. Montana election law allows counties with more than 8,000 registered voters or more than 5,000 mail-in voters to process mail-in ballots three business days before an election and begin counting those ballots on the Monday before Election Day. That work begins with county staff and trained, paid election judges sorting ballots based on the mix of precinct and precinct races listed on them, then marking them as “received” in the state’s election system.

From there, the signature on each absentee ballot envelope is verified against previous signature samples from a voter in the state system. Any discrepancies are checked by several election officials. If a signature is missing or rejected, the county will attempt to contact the voter directly to resolve the issue. Once a signature is accepted, the secrecy envelope containing the ballot is removed from the signature envelope. The ballot itself is later removed from the anonymized secrecy envelope, flattened, and safely stored with the other ballots in its stack until it is sent to an electronic tabulation machine for vote counting. Each of these steps is recorded on a sheet included with each bundle of ballots throughout the process.

A similar process will be applied across Montana tomorrow to ballots dropped off at polls, where voters will drop their completed ballots into collection boxes. The number of ballots collected in these drop boxes is recorded throughout the day. Once the polls close at 8 p.m., poll workers will check the totals. In many counties, the collection boxes are then transported from polling stations to a central tabulation center under the supervision of two election judges. The boxes are accompanied by corresponding poll books that contain the registered signatures of all voters who cast their votes at this polling station on election day.

Once polls close at 8 p.m., poll workers begin running ballots through the same electronic counting machines used for absentee voting. The machines themselves — made by Nevada-based ES&S, Montana's only certified provider of voting equipment — are required by law to be publicly tested for accuracy in the weeks leading up to the election. Ballots cast in batches are sent through the machines, with the number of ballots processed being checked and verified again. If a machine cannot process a ballot for some reason, such as the voter filling out too many bubbles for a single race or using a color of ink that the tabulator cannot read, the ballot is marked and sent to a nonpartisan election panel of judges must ensure that the voter's intent is accurately reflected in the evening's final counts.

Throughout the night, poll workers retrieve the total number of votes cast from each machine using a special USB stick provided by ES&S and upload them to a secure computer isolated from the Internet. The statewide results are in turn retrieved from this computer and uploaded to the Secretary of State's election system via a separate computer.

A note: Under Montana law, counties cannot release election results until their election offices have been notified that all of the county's voters who were in line at 8 p.m. have cast their ballots. In Montana, residents can register until polls close, so lines can be quite long at certain locations. This may mean that some districts will not release their first results until later in the evening.

Voters will see these results in updates to Montana's online voting dashboard. At the same time, hard copies of local results are being given to poll watchers and journalists at election offices across the state, data that sometimes allows news outlets like the Associated Press to report results faster than they appear on the state's official dashboard.

The Associated Press also makes betting predictions based on current results and historical results. In some cases, these polls are issued before the majority of ballots affecting a race are counted, based on the agency's ability to predict the likely political collapse of a district's voters.

Despite a wave of skepticism among some conservatives in recent years, Montana's ballot-counting process has been regularly described as fair, accurate and secure by state and local officials of all political stripes. State law also has numerous long-established protections, allowing political parties to recruit poll watchers to monitor local election day operations and requiring random post-election audits and precinct surveys to double-check and certify results.

Organizations like the nonprofit Carter Center have also launched independent monitoring initiatives this year to report on the safety and effectiveness of Montana's practices. And for added security, once the Secretary of State declares the results of the 2024 general election, Montana law requires county election officials to seal and lock away every single ballot for at least 22 months so that they are available for reference in any recounts, challenges or appeals .

This story was updated on November 5 to include additional information about when counties can release election results.