By Jesus Tellitud & Ruth Noemi Aguilar
“[Voting] was a bit stressful because I didn’t know what to do,” San Jose resident Julio Cesar said. “These [volunteers] helped me out every step of the way. But honestly, I was nervous about it.”
Cesar is 20 years old and a first-time voter. His father accompanied him to the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Library voting center Tuesday night.
The Santa Clara County Registrar of Voters Office expects to surpass the previous highest voter turnout, which was in 2008 with 86% participation, according to a Tuesday ABC7 News article. More than 700,000 ballots have been cast in Santa Clara County by 5:25 p.m. PST, ABC7 News reported in another article Tuesday.
According to its website, the Santa Clara County Registrar of Voters is in charge of administering elections in the county.
Voters were able to go to different polling locations to either drop off their mail-in ballots or to vote in person.
While traditional ballots were filled out at voting centers, electronic touch-screen voting machines were also available.
The touch-screen machines also had an attachable remote for anyone in need of accommodation because of a disability, according to Katherine Gonzalez, a vote center worker at the SJSU Hammer Theatre Center voting location.
Gonzalez said the machines were not heavily used by voters in the Hammer Theatre voting center.
“We were lucky enough to use it twice during this voting season . . . I think I heard [voters] used it twice all last March,” she said.
Transporting the ballots
Volunteers transported the ballots to the Santa Clara County Registrar of Voters Office to be checked and counted after the vote centers and drop boxes closed at 8 p.m., said Jamie Jones, administrative assistant for the Santa Clara Registrar of Voters.
The Registrar of Voters employees sort and count the ballots and place them into different categories such as mail-in ballots, provisional ballots and in-person ballots based.
Mail-in ballots were brought in blue bags from the 97 ballot drop boxes in Santa Clara County, according to the Registrar of Voters media packet.
Jones said the in-person ballots were brought in orange bags with their cartridges, which come from a machine that counts the ballots and the results.
“I mean, it's a huge operation and they need people to help out,” said Grace Schmidt, a Registrar of Voters volunteer and San Jose resident.
Working with provisional ballots
Jones said provisional ballots, which are given to voters who did not register before the Oct. 19 deadline, were brought in pink bags and were separated from the other in-person ballots. He said this is because of the extra verification needed to confirm information from voters.
Provisional ballots are checked separately from the other ballots because they have to be verified through other machines by specialized workers who require training.
Registrar of Voters workers verify voter information in case the voter needs to be notified of any mistakes on the ballot that needs to be resolved, such as missing or incorrect signatures, Jones said.
He added that signatures are one of the main reasons that ballots do not get verified.
Jones said the ballots could not be opened and counted without verification that a signature is correct. If a signature is not verified, the registrar's office reaches out to the voter three times to update it.
In California, the Registrar of Voters Office has around 17-20 days after the election to submit all verified ballots to get official results of the elections. Any unverified ballot is left unopened and not counted, Jones said.
Evelyn Mendez, public information officer for the Santa Clara County Registrar of Voters, said the office had about 1,500 volunteers working Tuesday. She said the process to count ballots went quicker this election because of new equipment used to scan and find errors in the ballots.
She said the adjudication process, which determines which candidate a voter cast their ballot for, sped up because workers used technology for the process instead of doing it by hand.
The office reaches out to the voters with unverified ballots on three different occasions to try to get their ballot verified, which is why the county waits until two days before the 17-20 day deadline to submit the ballots to the state, Mendez said.
“We wait because we curate the ballots and curate the rejected ballots,” she said.
