Stanislaus County elections office getting ready to count 75,000 additional ballots
Some local elections have not been decided yet, as the Stanislaus County elections office still has more than 73,000 mail ballots to process and count.
Donna Linder, county registrar of voters, released the figure in a news release Thursday following an unprecedented election conducted in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic.
The results in local, state and federal elections thus far are based on 120,436 votes tabulated by the county Registrar of Voters office on Election Day. It means about 40 percent of the ballots haven’t been counted yet.
Linder said the tallies for city council, school board, ballot measures and other elections will be updated Friday evening. Additional updates will come Tuesday and Nov. 13, until the count is completed, she said in an email.
The 73,000 are ballots that arrived at the elections office some days before or on Election Day. Election workers were not able to process those ballots for the tallies released Tuesday night.
The county used secure ballot boxes, satellite offices, drive up locations and the U.S. Postal Service to collect the flood of ballots in what was primarily a vote-by-mail election.
Linder said in the news release the 73,000 ballots must be processed by checking the signature on the envelopes, sorting by ballot type and opening and flattening so they’re ready for tabulation. The same process was happening in battleground states across the country as the public awaited the outcome of the nail-biter between President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden.
After those votes are counted in Stanislaus County, about 1,700 provisional, conditional and miscellaneous ballots also need to be tallied. In addition, state legislation was passed to make voting easier, including a 17-day period for accepting mailed ballots after Election Day.
Only ballots postmarked on or before Nov. 3 are valid.
The additional counting will decide the outcome of the Modesto City Council race in District 3. Chris Ricci holds a 141-vote lead over former Councilwoman Janice Keating.
In the Turlock Unified School District, less than 100 votes separate the current leader Jose Sanchez from incumbent Miranda Chalabi in Area 1, while there’s a 40-vote difference between incumbent Frank Lima and Daniel Benedict in TUSD Area 5.
The Yosemite Community College District Area 3 election has been too close to call. Milton Richards is leading Bryan Rogers by 166 votes.
In Patterson, only five votes separate Shawun Ruth Anderson and Shivaugn Alves in a city council race.
Otherwise, the top vote-getters prevailed by wider margins in city, county, state and congressional races in the unofficial results.
Last week, Lindner said her office was seeing a record number of mail ballots returned. About 115,500 were received by Oct. 29, compared to 72,000 returns at that point before November 2016 presidential election.
Seventy-seven percent of the county’s voters are registered to vote by mail, so it’s not unusual to have tens of thousands of ballots to count in the days after the polls close. After the June 5, 2018 primary, the county reported it had 42,000 mail ballots to count. The number was 50,000 after the November 2016 election.
This time, the county elections office followed the state order to hold a safe election by eliminating traditional polling places and sending mail ballots to every registered voter.
All told, the number of ballots cast in the November 2020 election could come close to 200,000 in Stanislaus County. The 195,886 ballots identified as of Thursday already far exceeds the 176,992 votes in the November 2016 election, which had a 73 percent voter turnout.
Thursday’s press release said 279,959 people were eligible to vote in the Nov. 3 election.
This story was originally published November 5, 2020 at 12:21 PM.
