Election Interest Picking Up and Vote by Mail Ballots Arriving by the Box Loads

After a sluggish start, the vote by mail ballots are starting to come in to election offices at a stronger pace as we get closer to election day, Tuesday.

In California, just over half of the registered voters have requested the vote by mail ballot.

In Santa Barbara County 65 percent of the voters have vote by mail ballots.

Special machines are humming at the County Elections Office where they verify signatures, and open envelopes to reveal the ballots.

That speeds up the process tremendously from years ago when much of the work was done by hand or less sophisticated machines.

“We’re able to run through batches of 200 ballots at a time and we will know if one ballot got misplaced, we will catch that in the process so no ballot is misplaced in the entire tabulation process,” said Joe Holland, Santa Barbara County Clerk-Recorder Assessor.

No errors have taken place with thousands of ballots going through the machines already. A log or tally sheet is posted at the office to keep track of the ballots processed and any issues.

Ten days prior to an election, the state allows counties to begin counting ballots. The results are stored until election night.

“At 8:05 p.m. the results of about 50,000 ballots (in Santa Barbara County) will go up on the web site then throughout the evening as we process the poll based ballots, the ones from the south county nearby we’ll get those results up probably at 9 p.m. The north county results as they are trucked down will be released between 10 p.m. and 11 p.m.,” said Holland.

If you still need to finish a vote by mail ballot, you can turn it in at any polling place or at the election office, but 8 p.m. Tuesday and it will count.

“There’s always something on the ballot that is important, it’s really important to show up,” said voter Michael Adcock who had an interest in the Governor’s race and local elected seats.

He admitted the judicial candidates were the toughest part of the ballot for him, but also said, a voter does not have to cast a full ballot.

What do some voters think of non voters?

“It shocks me. It appalls me. I just can’t believe it. And these same people complain afterwards about how things went. They have no right, everyone should vote,” said Felicia Saunders as she was going in to turn in her ballot.