Go ahead. Call Rick Rosas superstitious. He won't mind.

For the past 10 years, the Los Angeles accountant has worn the same tuxedo to the Academy Awards. He'll be donning the same one on Oscar night, as one of the official ballot counters for this year's ceremony.

"I'm still glad the tuxe fits," Rosas jokes.

Rosas also executes one other unwavering ritual as the lead ballot partner for PricewaterhouseCoopers, the accountancy firm that counts the ballots for the Academy Awards.

"I stand on the same side of the stage every year. I'm not about to switch now," Rosas told CTVNews.ca recently in a telephone interview from Los Angeles.

Rosas, along with his balloting partner Brad Oltmanns, will be the only two people in the world who will know the identity of the Oscar winners before the 84th Academy Awards, which will air Feb. 26 on CTV.

Those secret results will be carried down the red carpet and onto the stage of Hollywood's Kodak Theatre by the duo in a slick black briefcase.

That ritual has not changed since PricewaterhouseCoopers, or PwC as it is also known, counted its first Oscar ballots 78 years ago.

Since 1934, PwC has counted more than 450,000 ballots by hand, spending approximately 1,700 hours each year to count and verify the votes.

"It's been quite a run for this company," said Rosas.

"We take control of the voting process from beginning to end. This process has been going on now for three months, going back to the late fall and winter of 2011," Rosas explained.

Ballots are issued each year to voting members of the Academy. Today's mailing list includes 5,800 members.

The ballots are then returned to PwC and kept under tight security.

This year's ballots were mailed out on Feb. 1. They are due back on Feb. 21.

"We never disclose where the ballots are stored. We don't even open them until the week of the Oscars themselves," said Rosas.

Surprisingly, technology hasn't changed this balloting process in recent years.

"We still do it by hand," said Rosas. "We count all the 5,800 ballots individually to determine the winners for each category."

Since 1941, when this system was first introduced, papers with more than 2,600 winners' names have been stuffed into those famed Oscar envelopes.

That system has never been cracked, according to Rosas.

"If anyone were successful, one ballot by itself wouldn't do a lot to hurt a particular individual or category," said Rosas.

Indeed, all that has changed over the years is the number of men who carry in the briefcase bearing the winners' names.

"Decades ago one man did the job. Today two partners do it. That's partly because of the logistics of TV. It also ensures that at least one man won't be held up by L.A.'s traffic," said Rosas.

Eleven years into the job, Rosas still calls his gig "a little surreal."

When Oscar day arrives, Rosas and Oltmanns will each be escorted by an undercover police officer. That security will continue until the night's winner for Best Picture is read.

"I'm an accountant," said Rosas. "To spend the day shadowed by one of LAPD's finest still feels strange to me. But you'll never spot the security guys," he said, as a warning to any would-be pranksters.

"They'll be in tuxes, just like the rest of us."