Author: Roberta Millstein

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: