Under the California Voter’s Choice Act, Santa Clara County voters can now go to any vote center in the county and cast their ballots.
Every center will open the weekend before primary day on March 3, if not earlier, California Secretary of State Alex Padilla said.
The act has dramatically changed the way Santa Clara County voters can fulfill their civic duty.
“We’ve gone out and looked at over 1,000 locations in Santa Clara County to determine our best sites for our 110 vote centers,” said Shannon Bushey, the Santa Clara County Registrar of Voters.
Citizens can also register to vote at the centers on the same day they cast their ballots.
Former Santa Clara County Supervisor Ken Yeager said that he remembered when you had to register a month before the election to vote.
“The more barriers you take away, the more people are likely to vote,” he said.
For the first time in Santa Clara County history, all registered voters should have already received a vote-by-mail ballot, regardless of whether they had previously requested one or not.
Padilla touted the new system as “no more excuses” voting.
He said, given all of the new options and times, people can no longer say they didn’t have enough time to vote or that their assigned polling place wasn’t convenient for them.
Ryan Cajes, associate trainer for the Registrar of Voters and 2017 business and finance SJSU alumnus, demonstrated the county’s new ballot marking devices at the vote center’s ribbon-cutting ceremony Thursday.
The device allows voters, especially those with disabilities that could prevent them from filling out a standard paper ballot, to make their selections on a touch screen before printing out a ballot with their selections on it.
“Even though this is an electronic process, in the end, all of our ballots are on paper,” Cajes said.
Assembly member Ash Kalra authored Assembly Bill 59, which made placing voting centers on college campuses a priority, after hearing about the “dramatic increase in participation” that Sacramento State saw in 2018.
He commended Bushey and SJSU President Mary Papazian for preparing to host a voting center on campus in May 2019, before the bill was even signed.
Padilla said that he doesn’t just want to see higher youth turnout, but rather higher voter turnout “across the board.”
“While this is great for students, it’s very convenient for everybody who works at a university; you have professors, administrators and classified staff,” he said.
California is demonstrating to the rest of the nation that elections can both be accessible and secure, Padilla said.
