Voting is underway in California for the March 5 primary election.
“California has one of the best systems of voting in terms of transparency up and down the state,” said California Secretary of State Shirley Weber during a media tour of the Orange County Registrar of Voters’ office on Monday, Feb. 26. “There has been more interest in (the elections system) in the last five, six years.”
Out of the more than 1.86 million ballots sent out on Feb. 5 to all registered voters in Orange County (including military and overseas ballots), a little over 152,000 have already been returned, according to the most recent data available on the Orange County Registrar of Voters’ website.
Related: Orange County Register’s March 5, 2024 Primary Election Voter Guide
But what happens to a ballot — whether it was mailed through the U.S. Postal Service, dropped off at a large yellow drop box or delivered in person at a center — once it’s out of the voters’ hands?
Here’s a brief rundown of a ballot’s journey through the election process.
1. Ballots that are dropped off at a ballot box are collected by two-person teams and stored in a secure location when they arrive at the Registrar of Voters.
The 122 ballot boxes dispersed across Orange County each weigh more than 1,000 pounds and are bolted into the concrete at every location they’re at, said Registrar of Voters Bob Page.
Ballots submitted this way are collected daily by teams of two election workers, with a GPS tracker monitoring their location. Once the ballots arrive at the Registrar of Voters’ office, 1300 South Grand Ave., Building C in Santa Ana, they’re taken to a warehouse at the back of the building that’s accessible only to staff and visitors who go through security.
Inside the warehouse, the ballots, separated by the ballot drop boxes and vote centers they came from, are kept in a caged-off location limited to staff.
Ballots cast at a vote center are placed in a sealed bag and received each night by the Registrar of Voters’ office. These ballots are also tracked using GIS. Nearly 40 vote centers opened on Saturday, Feb. 24, serving Orange County residents daily, and almost 150 more will open beginning March 2.
2. Ballot envelopes are scanned for signature verification.
Next, ballots go through a sorting machine that takes an image of each vote-by-mail ballot envelope that gets sent to election workers who conduct signature verifications.
Page said the Registrar’s office expanded its capacity for processing mail ballots this election cycle, from two ballot sorting machines to four, in addition to adding more ballot extractors to the operation.
“After the 2022 general election, we had questions about the time it takes to process mail ballots after Election Day,” he said. “The Board of Supervisors invested $4 million to buy additional equipment.”
Once a ballot is scanned through a sorting machine, voters who have signed up for the Registrar’s tool that allows them to track their ballot will receive a notification stating that their ballot has been received. Ballots can also be tracked through the “Where’s My Ballot?” tool by the Secretary of State’s Office.
3. Once a ballot is verified, it’s separated from its envelope and prepared to be scanned for counting.
A voter’s signature on the vote-by-mail ballot envelope is compared to the voter’s signature on their original affidavit of registration, Page said. Once it’s deemed they match, the ballot is separated from its envelope by the ballot extractor, which slices open the envelope and blows air into it before a human operator removes the ballot from the envelope.
Then, the ballots, which are grouped by precinct, are unfolded and flattened by election workers for the scanning machine. Ballots that are damaged or marked improperly and cannot be read by the scanner will be duplicated, Page said, which is a process that marks on another ballot exactly what was selected from the original ballot so that it can be scanned. Both ballots are kept, Page said.
4. Ballots are scanned and reviewed for accuracy.
The next step for the ballots is to be scanned. At this stage, ballots have been signature checked, taken out of their envelopes and visually inspected by election workers.
Election workers take batches of 100 ballots or so and feed them one by one through ballot scanning devices, Page said. More than one worker reviews all batches to make sure all ballots are scanned without problems.
If a ballot can’t be read, it is set aside for duplication, in which a voter’s selections from a ballot that cannot be read by a scanner are copied onto a new ballot that can be scanned. The duplicated ballot is taken to be scanned while the original one is stored away. Both ballots are marked as such.
Once ballots have been scanned, they’re stored back in the warehouse in a secure, caged-off area.
5. Ballots are tabulated.
After ballots are scanned, they’re saved onto a thumb drive and brought to the tally room at the Registrar’s office. In the room, where access is limited to Registrar’s office staff, election workers will tally votes with software certified by the California Secretary of State. The system is “air-gapped,” meaning that it has no connection to the internet or any outside network.
On March 5, election watchers can view the process outside the tabulation room.
6. After the election, at least 1% of randomly selected ballots will be hand-counted before certifying the election to confirm the voting system results are accurate.
Per state election law, election officials are required to randomly select at least 1% of the precincts in their respective county and hand count all of the ballots that were cast within those precincts. Those ballots will be selected in public, random drawings and hand-counted by a team of four workers, assigned by Page to accomplish the task, according to the Registrar’s office.
