Linn County Election Officials Getting Questions about Absentee Ballot Tracker

The Linn County Elections Office says they have received numerous questions from voters about the status of their absentee ballot using the Iowa Secretary of State’s online absentee ballot tracker. 

Many voters are using the Iowa Secretary of State’s absentee ballot tracker and looking for a status of “Counted.” 

Linn County officials say the process of certifying and closing an election is labor intensive and can take up to six weeks to complete. Until the election is certified and closed, the only statuses displayed on the absentee ballot tracker tool is why a ballot has been rejected – if it was rejected. If the tracking results show a blank status, that is an indicator that the ballot was not rejected.

Absentee ballots received by the Auditor’s Office are submitted to the Absentee and Special Voter Precinct board, which is comprised of bipartisan teams who review the absentee affidavit envelopes, reject those that are incomplete or defective, and process the accepted absentee affidavit envelopes. Processing involves opening of the envelopes, extracting the secrecy folders, shuffling the secrecy folders to ensure secrecy of each voter’s vote is maintained, removing the ballot from each secrecy folder, and tabulating the votes on those ballots.

According to the Iowa Secretary of State’s Office, the absentee ballot tracker tool will indicate a status of “Accepted” once the election is closed.