On the final day to request mail-in ballots, the counter at the Erie County Election office was busy.

Some were requesting and casting mail-in ballots on the spot. 

We met others, like Tim Bogdanetz who is leaving on a family vacation soon, and could not wait for his recently requested ballot to arrive in the mail.

I'm leaving on a family vacation and I'm not going to be here in Erie to vote so I wanted to make sure I do get an opportunity to cast my ballot, and I did request a mail-in but I haven't received it so I wanted to make sure I get this done," Bogdanetz said.  "I'm still going to receive it in the mail but I'm going to shred it so we'll go ahead and cast it here from what I understand and we can just disregard the one that comes in later."
 

According to Tonia Fernandez, Supervisor of Elections, about 21-thousand of nearly 30-thousand requested mail-in ballots are already returned by mail, drop box or in person.  Elections staff has processed, time-stamped those and sorted them into bins by precinct to await canvassing and counting when the polls open November 8.

And more will be on the way.  "Well we still have about 9-thousand ballots still out there so it's going to take some time for us to get them recorded into the system and get them time stamped and then placed into the correct precinct bin," Fernandez said, "so that number is a little higher than I'd like."

Unlike the last few cycles, election officials hope to have results on election night.  Two new ballot extractors, machines purchased with an election integrity grant, should make things go much faster.  "We're really hoping so...they're supposed to be able to open 500 to 700 ballots an hour each, so we're hoping it will save us significant time," Fernandez said.

Erie News Now got a brief demonstration of how the ballot extractors work, first slitting two sides of the envelopes, then little suction cups opening the envelope so first the inner envelope can be pulled out, and on the second run the ballots can be extracted.

Election officials say plenty of extra human hands will be at work too. "We're going to have about 20 individuals here on election day and we have three shifts running so we'll start  7 a.m. and then we'll end once the final ballot has been opened, and we'll have a team opening the ballots manually and we'll have a team working the new machines," Fernandez said.