This election will require more paper ballots than any other in American history — which means some serious human labor and machine power.
This election will require more paper ballots than any other in American history — which means some serious human labor and machine power.
Comments
20,000 Ballots an Hour, With Paper and Ink by the Ton
ByChristopher PayneandMalia WollanOct. 26, 2020
The 2020 presidential election will require more absentee ballots than any election in American history.
Where do they all come from?
Printing the Franchise
Photographs by Christopher PayneText by Malia Wollan
Printing the Franchise
Photographs by Christopher PayneText by Malia Wollan
There were weeks in September when the four hulking digital printing presses at Runbeck Election Services in Phoenix ran almost continuously. Like bulked-up office printers, the presses — able to churn out nearly two million ballots in 24 hours — pull blank paper into a frenzy of printer heads, hang the paper momentarily like laundry, so the ink can dry, and then suck it back in to swiftly print the other side.
The people who run the machines worked overtime, too. In Runbeck’s sprawling warehouse, as many as 90 temporary workers were brought in to join each 12-hour shift printing the November ballots. (The temps, many of whom lost their previous jobs in the pandemic, wore red net jerseys to set them apart from the full-timers.) There were no weekends; many printers worked for over 40 consecutive days. It wasn’t unheard-of to log 130 hours of overtime in a single two-week pay period.
The people who run the machines worked overtime, too. In Runbeck’s sprawling warehouse, as many as 90 temporary workers were brought in to join each 12-hour shift printing the November ballots. (The temps, many of whom lost their previous jobs in the pandemic, wore red net jerseys to set them apart from the full-timers.) There were no weekends; many printers worked for over 40 consecutive days. It wasn’t unheard-of to log 130 hours of overtime in a single two-week pay period.
For months, printing plants across the country scrambled to meet the surge in demand for mail-in ballots, which required the work of additional machines and people. In October, the photographer Christopher Payne traveled to ballot-printing facilities in Kalamazoo and Phoenix to document the birth of a mail-in ballot.
The ballots start as blank rolls of paper weighing about 1,000 pounds.
Each roll is converted to some 20,000 ballots. At Runbeck, one of the largest ballot printers in the country, it takes about 45 minutes to finish a roll. For the November election, the company went through 6,500 miles of paper to print 36 million ballots for 214 counties in 11 states. Of those, at least 16 million were mail-in ballots, a fourfold increase since 2016.
Not since the hanging chad have ballots been so squarely in the political crosshairs. The printers feel the stress. “If ballot printers do the job well, nobody notices,” says Runbeck’s president, Jeff Ellington. “But if you have an error on a ballot, it's international news.”
‘If you have an error on a ballot, it’s international news.’
Once ballots come out of the printer, those bound for absentee voters get squeezed, folded, prodded and monitored far more than those headed directly to the precincts. The absentee ballots are bundled with other voting accouterments, like instruction sheets and “I voted” stickers: A little air hose blows open the envelope, and a machine jams the bundles inside, seals the envelopes and prints a voter’s name and address on the outside.
Cameras check the ballot barcode against the address barcode, and then the ballots are boxed and transported to the sorting machine, where lasers, scales and cameras again verify the contents and sort the ballots by ZIP code. After that, the ballots are loaded into boxes and put on pallets.
Paper is still considered the most secure and auditable voting technology.
Maybe it seems old-fashioned to vote on paper ballots, labored over by humans and sent through the mail. But after 20 years of glitchy attempts at paperless voting, election-security experts have come back around to paper ballots as the best option.
And while a pandemic means that a lot more Americans than usual will be voting without going to the polls, absentee ballots are not exactly some newfangled idea — they go back to the Civil War, when soldiers voted from battlefields. Digital files can be corrupted and hacked; a paper ballot leaves a clearer trail, littered with clues of intent.
Most important, of course, are the pen marks made by the voter. Look more closely, though, and there, on the paper, is evidence of other people’s intentions, too — the ones who brought that ballot into being, who made sure it was printed, cut and folded just so.


Christopher Payne is a photographer who specializes in architecture and American industry. He last photographed The Times’s printing plant in College Point, Queens.
Malia Wollan writes the weekly Tip column for the magazine. She lives in Oakland, Calif.
Additional design and development by Jacky Myint.
Next→
The Votes Being Counted

Correction: Oct. 28, 2020
An earlier version of a picture caption with the mobile presentation of this article misstated the number of overtime hours Runbeck Election Services workers logged. It was as much as 130 hours in a single two-week pay period, not 130 hours in a single week.