Why are we waiting on the vote count?

And other assorted reflections on the election while we wait

By Roberta Millstein

Waiting.  No one likes it.  In these days of Internet speed, we’ve gotten particularly bad at it.  But some things are worth waiting for.  An accurate vote count that lets every citizen’s ballot be counted is definitely worth waiting for.  A system that prioritizes voter access with in-person voting, mail-in votes (including time for ballots to arrive), and ample drop boxes, promotes citizen voices and democracy. California is doing things the right way, as hard as it is to wait.

In Davis, many of us (myself included) would very much like to know the results of Measure V, the Yolo County judicial race, and the Congressional race, all of which remain too close to call (as does the governor’s race).

But there is a little more going on in Yolo County in particular, as a recent NY Times article made clear:

In California, each of those counties decides how much to spend on election operations, creating major differences in their capacity to count ballots, said Ben Gips, who works on state voting policy for Protect Democracy.

Large counties such as Los Angeles and Orange have invested in equipment and staffing that typically allow them to finish counting more than 90 percent of ballots within a week of an election. Other counties can take three or four weeks.

“Basically, the counties have been trying to fill in for the sort of absent role of the state,” Mr. Gips said, “and some counties are more able to do that than others.”

The key areas that require funding are not only staffing and equipment but space to accommodate the workers and observers and to securely store ballots. In Yolo County, Calif., west of Sacramento, election officials knocked out a wall in their building a few years ago to make space to process the growing number of ballots, said Jesse Salinas, the county’s registrar of voters.

“We are at capacity,” he said. “I don’t have any empty space.”

Mr. Salinas, who is also the president of the California Association of Clerks and Election Officials, said that more than 50 percent of the ballots in his county were either postmarked or dropped off in person on Election Day this year. He described a whirring processing center operated by 25 to 30 staff members, all of them scanning, opening and sorting ballots as quickly as possible.

The office has two envelope-sorting machines that cost a quarter of a million dollars each.

“Local elected officials are doing everything they can,” he said. “If I had more space and more equipment and more staffing — it’s a resource issue — if I had all that stuff, then it could happen faster,” he said.

So there are several issues that have combined to make Yolo County’s ballot counting slow: less money devoted to election operations, resulting in a shortage of staffing, equipment, and space for vote counting, exacerbated by ballots turned in or mailed on election day itself: more than 50% of the total ballots!  Many Davisites seem to have heeded the call to wait to vote on the governor’s race given the worry about having two Republicans in the November election; that worry had essentially dissipated a few weeks before June 2, but it seems as though people were cautious and waited anyway. 

In any case, I am grateful for Jesse Salinas’s diligence and those of his staff.  Perhaps Yolo County can consider providing him with more resources for the next vote.

Other assorted reflections on the election:

One reflection is the role of the mainstream media.  I was fairly stunned to receive the above information about Yolo County elections from the New York Times.  I know that the Davis Enterprise is struggling, but did anyone there call Jesse Salinas to get an update from him?  It’s hard to believe that they would talk to the NYT but not the DE. 

I was also frustrated with the lack of “follow the money” coverage in the DE, especially in local races where it seemed especially significant: Measure V, the District 4 congressional race, and the Yolo County judge’s race.  The DE used to include updates concerning amounts and sources of donations, but not this time.  All we got were some fluff pieces about each of the major candidates, some basic information about the Village Farms project, and then nothing further. 

If anyone at the DE is reading this, can you do better for the November election?  Really, writing a five-article series on the money in Eric Jones’s campaign was not how I had planned to spend my spring.  That was really the job of local media.  (Some other local newspapers in the district, like the Napa Valley Register and the Press Democrat, had some coverage of this). 

Speaking of Jones, there have been a number of recent articles about the role of high tech money in California’s elections and in elections nationwide — just search on “high tech money in elections” or something along those lines to get the scope of things.  If you are particularly interested in the connected issues of AI, data centers, water usage, and energy usage, see this article especially, but also check out the rest of Judy Tipple’s “Follow the Money” series.  

If Jones fails to advance to the November election — he is currently in third behind Mike Thompson and Ray Riehle — will we have heard the last of him?  Or will he try again in District 4?  Or in some other district?  Or will he seek to fund other AI and high-tech friendly candidates?  This will be important to pay attention to.

On a completely different subject, I was taken by surprise with the judicial election. Everyone I know was in favor of Ryan Davis, and many who spoke up for him were much better placed to do so than I, so I focused my attention elsewhere.  Now, with the election so close, I regret not speaking up. I will remember for the future that voters who are not paying much attention might not have judicial elections on their radar, and thus simply not vote in that race.  I’m not fully sure that will turn out to have been an important dynamic in that race, but it may very well. 

The lesson here is, talk to your neighbors about the races that are important to you, even if you don’t think they will be close.  Regardless of what happens with Village Farms, the Willowgrove project will be on the ballot in November, plus the top two from the governor’s election and the congressional one.  It should be interesting.