ST. CHARLES COUNTY, Mo. – With record numbers of absentee ballots being mailed in, FOX 2/KPLR 11 took a closer look at what happens when your ballot gets to a county’s election headquarters.

The mailed-in absentee and early voting ballots in St. Charles County are safely stored in the election headquarters absentee vault until they can be counted on election day.

When you mail in your ballot, it first goes to a file room where it has to be stamped as “on time.”

“I have a bipartisan team that stamps all the mail they receive,” St. Charles County Director of Elections Kurt Bahr said. “Anything that’s normal mail, we’ll open right away and process. Anything that’s ballots, we’ll box back and take to the absentee room.”

Once separated, the ballots come to the vault. They are not allowed to be touched until this Thursday when they will be prepared to be counted on election day.

“After we get them, we divide them to clerks and have them input these ballots into the system letting us know these voters ballots have been received by us,” Bahr said.

Once they’re entered into the system, the ballots are packaged together.

For the first time, voters can also track their ballots once they have mailed them in using a ballot tracking system.

“They can see when it was sent, when it was sent to them from vendor to their home, then when it’s received by us, it will show it once it’s here,” Bahr said.

To track your ballot visit: https://sccmo.ballottrax.net/voter/.