San Joaquin County registrar of voters: ‘Best election we’ve seen in five years’
Election night has come and gone, but for election workers at the San Joaquin County Registrar of Voters, the work has just begun.
The registrar was able to count and report nearly 80,000 ballots by the end of election night on Tuesday, a vast improvement on the first night of the June 7 primary election plagued with a blurry barcode blunder. Olivia Hale, the county’s newly appointed registrar who stepped up after the sudden, tragic death of former Registrar of Voters Heather Ditty days before the June primaries, said Nov. 8 was the “best election we’ve seen in five years.”
“Everyone was at the warehouse early; they were ready to go,” Hale said. “If we had got more ballots back, we would have had more ballots to report. But unfortunately, like we’ve seen in the past, (voters) all waited until Monday and Tuesday to return their vote-by-mails.”
The first results released on election night came from mail-in ballots received by Nov. 5. Election staff then drew from the Nearly 16,500 people that cast their votes in-person Nov. 8 at a polling location, Hale said. That’s about 10,000 more than in the June primaries and roughly 40,000 less than the 2018 midterms. There are about 385,000 registered voters in San Joaquin County.
“That speaks volumes about the impact that vote-by-mail is having on our county,” Hale said.
Some 23,000 people dropped off their mail-in ballots to a polling location — not a drop box — on Election Day, Hale said. The ROV office received 33 trays — ballpark 200 to 300 ballots in each tray — of vote-by-mail ballots on election night and received 19 more trays the next morning. As long as vote-by-mail ballots are postmarked by Election Day and received by Nov. 15, they will be counted, Hale said.
“We’re expecting (vote-by-mail ballots) to start to dwindle down,” Hale said. “But there will be some more that come in definitely.”
Hale estimates there are anywhere from 60,000 to 100,000 ballots remaining to be counted. She has until Dec. 8 to certify the election results.
At the registrar’s ballot-counting operation Nov. 8, three banks of desks — one area for opening ballot envelopes; one for inspection and one for tabulation — were spread out across the warehouse space near the Stockton Airport. To transfer the results from the ROV’s systems to the online results page, staff loads them onto a specially designed encrypted thumb drive.
As of Nov. 9, the ballot-counting has been moved to the registrar’s office, where over the coming weeks, 75 temporary election staff will finish counting ballots. Hale welcomed anyone to come by the registrar's office at 44 N. San Joaquin St. in downtown Stockton to check out the process.
“If you have any kind of concerns about the election, right now is an excellent time to come up to our office and take a tour and see what’s going on,” Hale said. “If you are curious about signature verification, if you want to see how we scan the ballots or go about preserving the information … how do (we) do it without using the internet, all those interesting things. We want folks to come in and take the opportunity to tour.”
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Record staff writer Aaron Leathley contributed to this report.
Record reporter Ben Irwin covers Stockton and San Joaquin County government. He can be reached at birwin@recordnet.com or on Twitter @B1rwin. Support local news, subscribe to The Stockton Record at https://www.recordnet.com/subscribenow.
This article originally appeared on The Record: San Joaquin County election: Ballot count underway, open to public
