Elections office working to verify signatures, sort ballots

Employees with the Merced County Elections Office are working long hours this week to verify and sort mail-in ballots from last week’s election.

Monday was the last day the office accepted mail-in ballots as long as they were postmarked by or on Nov. 8. If voters didn’t sign their mail-in ballots, they have until Wednesday to make a trip to the elections office to do so. If voters decline to sign their ballots, they also may submit an unsigned ballot statement. If not, their ballots cannot be verified according to state law.

This week, staff will be working on the official canvass of the election.

Employees mostly are working on signature verification, Registrar of Voters Barbara Levey said. The ballots are sorted into precincts after the signatures are verified.

“If a staff member challenges the signature, they have to ask another staff member until it comes to me,” she said. “It’s a tedious process.”

The office must also reconcile the roster for voters who voted at the polls by scanning the roster into the computer system to record whether or not voters participated in the election.

After all the ballots are received and signatures are verified, elections staff must count the ballots before opening them for tabulation. Last week, Levey said in a statement at least 20,000 ballots remained to be counted, including provisional ballots.

Levey hopes to have another update on results by the middle of next week. The first tabulation after the election took more than 10 hours.

After that, elections staff will move to processing the provisional ballots, which requires even more research and time.

Staffers also have to process ballots from military personnel stationed overseas and ballots from voters living abroad. Those voters send a fax of their ballot, which staff must transfer onto another ballot to be counted.

Those uncounted votes will determine a number of local elections.

For instance, Lee Lor, who is challenging Hub Walsh for the Merced County District 2 supervisor seat, leads by about 500 votes. For the District 3 Merced City Council seat, fewer than 100 votes separate the top two vote-getters. Some school board races are even closer.

California law requires the election to be certified by Dec. 6.

This story was originally published November 14, 2016 at 5:18 PM with the headline "Elections office working to verify signatures, sort ballots."