Kevin Kiley called out California’s ballot counting on Fox News. Why is it slow?
Kevin Kiley, the declared winner of California’s 3rd Congressional District, did not pull his punches when he criticized the state’s slow ballot counting on national television.
“We have a government that doesn’t perform, that has an extremely low standard of performance,” Kiley said Sunday on Fox News’ “The Next Revolution.” At the time, he had already declared his victory but the Associated Press, which usually calls races, had yet to do so. The news organization named Kiley the winner on Tuesday afternoon.
Election officials in Placer County, where Kiley grew up, went into the weekend with a reported 82,000 ballots left to count. When the Associated Press called the race four days later, there were still about 52,000.
Those same election officials say that Kiley is certainly entitled to his own opinion, but they do beg to differ about the standard of performance.
“We’d love to show Mr. Kiley around,” said Stacy Robinson, Placer County Public Information Assistant. “He’s been here for his candidate paperwork but he hasn’t done a tour. We’d love to take him on one.”
Kiley is just one of many across the state concerned with what they say is a slow process for counting ballots. Like much of California, the enormous increase of mail-in ballots over the past two years has slowed the counting process. But a few counties — Placer being among them — stood out in the days after the election for having a serious ballot backlog. At the time of Kiley’s comments, only Lake and Mendocino counties had a higher percentage per capita of uncounted ballots than Placer, and other counties with a similarly sized electorate such as Stanislaus, Santa Barbara, and Solano have managed to count ballots at a faster pace.
But Robinson and County Clerk Ryan Ronco, who was appointed to his position in 2016 after working in the elections office since 1993, said Monday that it was business as usual for the northern California county.
“The media always calls races,” he said, “but we typically don’t certify election results until the 29th day. That’s standard for us.”
Per California election law, counties have up to 29 days after Election Day to certify results. This is particularly useful in a post-COVID election landscape, where a vast majority of voters are doing so by mail, and mail-in ballots are accepted up to one week after the election so long as they’re postmarked on or before Election Day.
The Secretary of State’s office agreed that there’s nothing nefarious happening in Placer.
“Elections officials in Placer are doing exactly what they’re supposed to do to ensure voting rights and the integrity of elections,” said Joe Kocurek, the office’s spokesman.
That doesn’t mean, though, that Ronco thinks their process is perfect.
Placer County and the ‘human touch’
“I know I keep saying this,” Robinson said, “but speed is desirable, accuracy is non-negotiable.”
Part of that accuracy comes from a shared philosophy among election officials in the county who believe in adding a “human touch” to the election process.
On a busy Monday afternoon almost three weeks after the election, the human touch was on full display. Dozens of staff were busy running ballot envelopes through the processor, verifying signatures, extracting ballots from those envelopes, checking them for any egregious problems (think grease stains or post-it notes) sorting them into boxes by supervisorial district, transporting them in teams to the tabulation room to be tallied, and counting many of them manually.
In all of these steps, there are small, seemingly innocuous aspects to the envelope and ballot counting process that voters might not understand. For example, Placer County ballot envelopes have a tab over the voter’s signature to prevent anyone from duplicating it.
“In this way, no ballot ... can be identified as belonging to any specific individual, thereby preventing anyone from tampering with a ballot based on the voter that cast it,” Robinson said. Only a portion of California counties incorporate this added measure, and manually removing the tabs one-by-one from thousands of ballots can take a lot of time, but election officials think it’s important to offer as much security to voters as they can.
“Just one more layer of security we employ to protect the voter and their votes,” said Robinson.
Placer County also has staff members manually verify signatures on mail-in ballot envelopes, despite there being a “confidence setting” on their processor that would verify the signatures electronically.
“We think voters should be reassured by that — that we’re double checking everything ourselves,” said Robinson.
Another arduous part of the counting process is the Secretary of State requirement that all counties participate in what’s called a “1% manual tally.” Election staff must count 1% of ballots by hand from randomly selected precincts, and in one precinct for each race not included in those that have been randomly selected. The purpose of this is to make sure the count matches the tabulation machine results and guarantee an accurate count.
In Placer County, this was an enormous task this election cycle because there were so many races, and each race must be represented in the manual tally. On top of the statewide contests and propositions, specific to Placer County were varying board seats across 15-20 school districts, plus parks and recreation, irrigation, fire protection and other municipal departments.
Because election code requires every single race in the county to be represented in the manual tally, election staff had to randomly select ballots from 21 additional precincts to make sure all races were included.
Ronco said that calling it a 1% manual tally is “a misnomer” and that ultimately election staff end up tallying 10-25% of ballots by hand.
There are some updates that he said he wants to make that may modernize some of its current systems. They plan on upgrading their current envelope processor to the Blue Crest machine used by Sacramento County, not because they don’t trust the one they have now, but because the Blue Crest machine works more efficiently and would help speed up the tab removal process.
Placer County sits out of Voters Choice Act option
Ronco also plans on discussing with the Board of Supervisors a transition from the current election day poll center model to the new Voters Choice Act model, which would replace traditional polling places with modernized voting centers dispersed across the region that would open 10 days before Election Day. There are reasons that Placer County has not transitioned to this yet — voters are used to their polling places and like having options. And in a county as geographically diverse and remote as some parts of Placer, only having 10 centers might pose a problem to rural voters who are used to the county’s 164 polling centers.
Hanging onto their traditional polling centers meant that Placer election officials opted for a long-favored process that requires extra work at a time when other counties are opting for a more technologically advanced approach.
Their process involved recording in-person votes on memory cards that teams of election staff escorted back to the office after the polls closed on Election Day, along with polling place election rosters. After Election Day, there’s a lengthy process that involves crosschecking those rosters with voter registration information to make sure no mail-in ballot voters also try to vote in-person.
“Unlike other counties that utilize the VCA model, and therefore use laptops that update that vote history in real time, our rosters are printed, packaged and shipped to our polling places a few days prior to the election so that our poll workers are assured to have the materials required to facilitate an organized and accurate election,” Robinson said.
“With many of our polling places in the Truckee and Tahoe area, you can imagine the effort and planning it requires to get that data to them, especially this year during a heavy winter storm that affected travel immensely.”
This process means that staff must comb through hundreds of thousands of lines of voter registration information after Election Day, all while hundreds of thousands of mail-in ballots are being dropped off.
“This important step of the process is necessary, and must happen first, to ensure that we don’t also count any vote-by-mail ballots submitted by in-person voters, thereby preventing any one voter from voting twice,” she said.
It takes a long time, sure. But officials think the system is worth it.
“We feel that the juice is worth the squeeze, and until voters tell us differently, that’s the process we’re going to follow.”
Making their list, checking it twice
This year, there was another culprit that officials say may have contributed to slowing down the process — the Great Resignation.
“We’re not special here,” Robinson said. “We were not spared.”
Placer County works with a temp agency to bring on seasonal staff, and both Robinson and Ronco said they had a hard time both hiring workers prepared for the demanding hours and retaining the workers they did hire to stay on through the whole season.
“We’re competing with remote jobs, which doesn’t help,” said Ronco. Neither, they say, does the somewhat remote Auburn location.
The county office in Auburn, located just off of Highway 49, is a good 40-45 minute drive from Sacramento without traffic, and that’s where many of their staff commute from. About half of the office’s current election workers have worked one election before, and a quarter of them have been there for several election cycles. The rest are brought on from the temp agency, and Ronco said this was the first year they had to steal staff members from the Clerk’s office in the same building to try to meet the demand of counting all those mail-ins.
While Robinson and Ronco say they feel like this election cycle is business as usual, they do think external forces are intensifying the time it’s taking to count ballots.
“I think that it feels more intense to voters because of what’s at stake for them, with the changes of power happening” said Robinson, of the Republican Party’s takeover of the House. (The Democrats managed to hold onto the Senate.)
But election officials are keeping cool under pressure, and have faith in their process.
“We’re making our list, and we’re checking it twice,” said Robinson, while surveying stacks and stacks of white boxes full of mail-in ballots at the election office, happy to reiterate once again that the reason ballots are taking this long to count is because the Santa’s workshop-like assembly line of temporary election workers is approaching the task as thoroughly as possible.
“It’s our North Pole,” Robinson said. And she’s eager for community members — not just politicians such as Kiley — to see the process in action.
She and Ronco said they’re still giving tours to concerned citizens, which they say helps to demystify the otherwise mysterious system.
And most people, Robinson and Ronco says proudly, leave satisfied.
“People just want their concerns heard,” she said, “and we’re happy to address them.”
This story was originally published November 23, 2022 at 6:00 AM with the headline "Kevin Kiley called out California’s ballot counting on Fox News. Why is it slow?."
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