SLO County Elections Office Details Several Changes for Upcoming 2026 Vote
SAN LUIS OBISPO, Calif. (KEYT) - With voters set to cast their ballots in two separate elections in 2026, the San Luis Obispo County Clerk-Recorder's Office is highlighting a number of changes set to take place this year.
The office held a special media day event on Tuesday to help begin the process of educating the public of what is in store for both the Primary Election on June 2, 2026 and the General Election on Nov. 3, 2026.
"We're already well into preparations for June," said Erin Clausen, San Luis Obispo County County Clerk-Recorder's Office Public Information Specialist. "The elections are coming fast and furious."
Held at the Elections Center in the Katcho Achadjian Government Building in downtown San Luis Obispo, San Luis Obispo County Clerk-Recorder Elaina Cano spent more than an hour with media members going logistics of the primary election, detailing changes in the two Elections Day and canvass processes, as well as cover key dates in the months ahead.
A significant change to the elections this year is a new state law that went into effect at the start of the year that will require election offices to process, tabulate and report the results of all Vote-by-Mail ballots within 13 days of the election.
According to the San Luis Obispo County Clerk-Recorder's Office, the new law means that during the upcoming June Primary election, while there will still be provisional ballots to research and signatures to cure (to fix or correct minor ballot errors) before those ballots can be counted, the bulk of counting will be complete by the end of the day on Monday, June 15.
"In SLO County about 95% of voters cast their ballot by mail," said Clausen. "That process for processing those vote by mail ballots takes a while. We can get anywhere from 30 to 50,000 vote by mail ballots on Election Day. People will drop them off at voting locations or mail them in so that they're coming in to us a couple of days after, and we have to process all of those by June 15th and have those reports and those results reported out."
One of the key elements to the event was the demonstration of the county's brand new Agilis Election Mail Sorting and Processing System.
The $500,000 state-of-the-art technology scans and captures voter information, interfaces with the vogter registration system provides automatic signature verification capabilities to supplement manual verification and sorts and opens envelopes for ballot processing.
"One of the reasons we're going to be able to make that (June 15th) deadline is because we just acquired the Angilis machine and that's a sorter and processor that we will run those vote by mail ballots through to capture the signatures to do first classification of which ones need high level signature check. said Clausen. "Then those go to the human signature checkers and then it come back to the Agilis to open, but that machine just they fly through there and with our small staff, our relatively small staff for the 182,000 voters we have in this county, so that capability will really help us meet that deadline of 13 days to process those vote by mail ballots."
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