“Oh my God,” cries one election worker at the check-in table, stumbling over the plastic chain as she rushes at a fellow staffer who has just entered. “The missing link.”

“Hello, beautiful,” he says, spreading his arms to receive her. Together they cross the “no-no line,” as she calls the boundary between viewers and staffers, and take their places at tables.

The first poll attendant reports to the check-in desk, heaving a sealed crate and a large padded bag—sheltering his all-important Accu-Vote counting machine—onto the table.

The two election commission staffers rummage through the bag, inspecting the machine and moving down a checklist.

In this case, inspection appears to be an imperfect science.

“Key in the bag?” one staffer asks.

The poll attendant reaches into his pocket and flings the machine key across the tabletop. The staffer checks the “yes” box. She then inspects the machine’s seal, which should bear the box’s identification number. There is no seal.

“That was not sealed this morning,” the poll attendant says.

The inspection concludes and the poll attendant, dressed in a T-shirt and a loose jacket, shakes his pelvis in a victory dance and waddles to his spot at another table. Someone asks one of the check-in staffers what the counting process is.

“It’s changing as we speak,” she says.

The vote count itself comes from memory cards taken in the Accu-Vote machines and subjected to computer analysis. Today, some of the problem ballots—those with write-ins or marking errors—will be hand-checked, and the count will be finalized in a process called The Real Thing.

Though the process is straightforward in theory, it spawns a host of complications. In this year’s count, two of the memory cards ran out of space, so votes for two districts have to be re-tallied. In some cases, written records do not agree.

At 9:30 p.m. Election Commissioner Lynne F. Molnar—one of four—squeezes through the crowd and enters the counting zone. About 45 minutes later, she takes up the microphone.

The first round of results—from 31 of Cambridge’s 33 precincts—are ready. The crowd grows silent with the sound of her voice.

“Do you want me to read them?” Molnar asks.