This article also came from the Grant County Clerk's Office from Clerk Marisa Castrillo.

This one describes the duties of the Absentee Board.

 This duties of the absentee precinct board is primarily addressed under the provisions 1-6-11 and 1-6-14.

A summary of the absentee precinct board process is as follows:

When the county clerk convenes the absentee board  (earliest could be the Thursday prior to Election Day depending on the volume of Absentee Ballots ), a review of the official mailing envelope is conducted.  Before opening the official mailing envelope, the board must review that the required voter identification information has been completed.  Due to legislation passed during the special session (SB4) this includes the signature and last 4 of the SSN. In some cases, if the outer envelope does not have the complete information, the board may look to other information the voter may have provided after submitting the ballot to resolve any missing information including an affidavit with the required information.  Any rejected ballots shall be separated and secured away from accepted ballots.

No sooner than the Thursday prior to election day (for counties with fewer than 10,000 absentee ballots), for ballots deemed to be accepted, the board officials may begin separating the official mailing envelope and the inner secrecy envelope and begin feeding the ballots into the tabulation machine for counting.  The vote tally must not be disclosed prior to the close of polls on election night.   

This process will continue for all ballots received prior to the deadline which is 7:00 PM on Election Day.  If the absentee ballots are not completely processed and counted by 11pm on election day, the board will recess at 11pm and reconvene the next day to continue its work.

Occasionally the absentee board will have a ballot that will have to be hand counted if it cannot be fed into the tabulator machine.  There is a special tally sheet and process for this.  Additionally, for a county with a write-in candidate, these contests will have to be reviewed, qualified, and hand counted as well.

Before the absentee board is done, they must account for every ballot received as indicated on the absentee ballot register.  All counted ballots (machine counted and hand tallied) plus all rejected ballots must match the total ballots received.