LAKE COUNTY, Calif. – The work to complete Lake County’s count of ballots from Tuesday’s presidential primary is underway, with the interim registrar of voters reporting that thousands of ballots remain to be counted.
Interim Registrar of Voters Diane Fridley also reported that she doesn’t yet have a preliminary vote count in the Lake County Superior Court judicial race.
“The votes have not been tabulated yet,” Fridley said of the judicial race.
That race is unusual in that both candidates, incumbent J. David Markham and challenger Lisa Proffitt-O’Brien, are write-ins.
Fridley said Thursday that she had an overall preliminary count of ballots for the primary remaining to be tallied that she had to report to the Secretary of State’s Office by noon.
In that initial preliminary estimate, she reported that 9,945 ballots are not counted, a number she guaranteed will grow.
That number isn’t just vote-by-mail – or absentee – ballots that are still coming in, but also includes provisional and conditional ballots voted at the polls at the Registrar of Voters Office in the courthouse in Lakeport, Fridley said.
Having thousands of ballots still to count after election night is common. Although the Registrar of Voters Office issues preliminary counts, the election results aren’t final and certified until after the monthlong canvass.
Over the past decade, more voters in Lake County have turned to absentee voting. While many absentee ballots are mailed or delivered to the Registrar of Voters Office ahead of the election or on election day, it can be days after the election before all of them arrive in the mail.
Fridley said she received 366 ballots in the mail on Wednesday, had another whole tray that had arrived on Thursday and hadn’t yet been counted, plus more are expected to arrive on Friday, the last day ballots can arrive by mail and be counted under state elections law. Ballots had to have been postmarked by Tuesday.
New equipment, new processes
This is the first major election during which the Registrar of Voters Office has used the new voting equipment it purchased last year from Hart InterCivic. The equipment was first used in May’s special election for the Lakeport Fire Protection District’s fire tax measure.
Fridley said the new equipment requires additional steps, including adjudicating the scanning system.
Ballots are scanned into a scanner, and then that information is placed on a flash drive and loaded into a different machine, the tabulation unit. Fridley said the new protocols they have to follow require that the two machines cannot talk to each other.
In counting and reviewing ballots, Fridley said elections staff has to look for undervotes – places where the voters didn’t fill in the rectangle next to a name or didn’t vote in a category.
In the judicial race, “We did go through the ballots on election night. That’s one of the steps,” she said.
The Superior Court race had no candidates’ names printed on the ballot. Instead, voters had to write in the name of one of the two qualified candidates for their vote to count and check the box next to the name.
Fridley said that if the voter marked the box, elections staff made sure the candidate whose name was written in was qualified and then moved on. However, state election code allows for the vote to be counted even if the box next to the name is not checked.
Fridley said each of the ballots with a write-in candidate needed to be reviewed. “That’s why it took longer election night,” she said.
She said the write-in judicial race slowed down the adjudication process on election night. “We had to be very careful.”
Fridley added, “We don’t count all the writes-ins on election night. You’d never get results out.”
As it was, she issued the last report on the preliminary count just before 2:30 a.m. Wednesday and then had to fax it to the Secretary of State’s Office, which had trouble reading the report until she emailed it. Fridley said she didn’t leave the office to go home until just before 5 a.m. that day.
Fridley said she will issue an update soon on how many ballots remain to be counted.
California counties have until April 3 to complete and certify their vote count as part of the official canvass, according to the Secretary of State’s Office.
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Registrar of Voters Office: Thousands of votes still to count, no tally yet in judicial race
- Elizabeth Larson
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