Maryland's Web-delivered ballots -- more than 110,000 have been requested -- must be hand-copied by po

[intrepidity]

3. I think they'll manage OK.

For transparency’s sake, the transcription is done by a pair of judges — one a Republican, the other a Democrat. One judge reads the ballot choices aloud, and the other marks them down on the ballot. Then the judges switch jobs to check each other’s work.

The process takes about five minutes per ballot, election officials said. As of Thursday, that added up to more than 9,000 hours of work just to get the ballots ready to be scanned.

The pace was so furious that some election officials feared they would not be able to transcribe and count all the Web-delivered ballots by mid-December, when the state’s presidential electors convene to seal Maryland’s votes in the electoral college.

Officials launched several efforts to avoid that outcome.