Record pace: Coronavirus leads to a wave of early voting in Stanislaus County
Four years ago, early voting in the presidential election that put Donald Trump in the White House was record-setting.
The number of mail ballots returned for the upcoming Nov. 3 election in Stanislaus County is double the amount in 2016, said Donna Linder, county registrar of voters, who’s pleased with the early voting this year.
As of early this week, the county’s registered voters had returned more than 60,000 ballots. At the same point in 2016, the county Elections Office had received 32,000 ballots from people choosing to vote by mail.
Because of the COVID-19 crisis, mail ballots for the November 2020 election were automatically sent to the 268,315 registered voters in Stanislaus County in early October.
Linder said it appears people are voting earlier than usual.
“We are excited to see Stanislaus County voters using the drop box options and returning their ballots so early for processing,” Linder said.
In the 2016 presidential election, the county’s voter turnout was 73 percent; 74 percent of local voters cast mail ballots.
As of Tuesday, at least 34 million voters nationwide had already cast their ballots, according to the U.S. Elections Project, which is tracking early voting data. That number is based on data from all but four states — Idaho, New York, Missouri and Arkansas — which the project says haven’t reported numbers.
About 5.9 million Americans had voted early around this time in 2016, the U.S. Election Project wrote Sunday in its weekly data analysis.
The national election in 2016 broke the record for early voting, when about 40 percent of voters cast their ballots early, the elections project says.
In Stanislaus County, people are mailing their completed ballots or using official drop boxes placed by the county elections office at 16 indoor locations and two outdoor spots. Locations are listed at stanvote.com.
Linder said staff are seeing clean ballots returned, meaning people are signing their ballot envelopes and ballots are not soiled or damaged. The acceptance rate is 99.3 percent, she said. For less than 1 percent of returned ballots, election workers need to contact the voter about a missing signature or other problems.
Linder said people who return a ballot for someone else, in many cases a family member or friend, are signing the envelope as required. She did not mention any problems with campaign workers returning ballots that can’t be processed.
County election workers are sent every day to gather ballots from the county’s official drop boxes, Linder said.
With the close of traditional voter registration Monday, the Registrar of Voters office will be sending ballots to newly registered voters.
While voting this year is on a record pace, the elections project says the ratio compared to 2016 has started to narrow. Last week, early voting numbers were about 6.5 times what they were at the same point in 2016 while this week they’re running at about five times that number, the project’s analysis on Sunday says.
“The ratio of 2020 early vote to 2016 early vote is going to come down simply because it is impossible that early voting is going to be six times what it was in 2016,” the analysis says.
McClatchy’s Washington Bureau contributed to this story.
This story was originally published October 22, 2020 at 12:08 PM.
