More than 16,000 early-voting ballots received by Merced County ahead of election

The Merced County Registrar of Voters has already received more than 16,000 ballots for the upcoming Nov. 5 general election.

According to Melvin Levey, Merced County registrar of voters, the county began processing vote by mail ballots Oct. 9. The polls will close at 8 p.m. on Election Day. By about 8:15, the county will post the first batch of results, consisting of vote by mail ballots received prior to Nov. 5.

The county will then post two additional updates on election night; the second, about 10 p.m., will consist of in-person early votes prior to Election Day. The final update on election night, closer to midnight, will consist of voting results from in-person voting on Election Day.

“After that, then the next result reporting after election night will be the following Friday,” Levey said. “From there, we will go once a week, generally on Thursdays, unless we have a lot of additional results to report in between.”

Notices will be posted on the mercedelections.org website to notify the public when the next results will be reported.

Workers have been collecting and retrieving ballots from the 20 ballot drop boxes throughout the county as well as the United Sates Post Office. Those ballots are taken to the elections facility on East 15th Street, where workers take a raw count of the number of ballots and from where those ballots were collected. The ballots then go on to a process of signature verification, according to Levey.

“Before we can open the envelope to even extract the ballot, we have to verify that the voter whose name is on that envelope is the voter who signed the envelope and that that voter hasn’t voted before in this election,” Levey said. “We run those envelopes through a scanner that takes a picture of that signature, and then we have a team of folks that are going through and examining the signature to match it against the signatures that we have on file for that voter.”

After those signatures are matched, a machine will open the envelopes to extract the ballot. After the ballot is extracted, workers have no way of knowing which ballot came from which envelope. The envelopes are retained for audit purposes, and the ballots are inspected and run through a tabulator machine in batches.

The machine reads the ovals that are filled in on the ballots, and the votes are tabulated. Anything on the ballot that isn’t read by the scanner is separated for teams of elections officials to review by hand, Levey said.

Later, some ballots are used to check for accuracy.

“We actually pull random batches of ballots, and we hand-count those to make sure that the tabulators worked correctly,” said Levey. “We’ll get a team together. We will hand-count those ballots, and then we’ll match up those results that they hand-counted against what the machine said.”

In previous years, election officials had up to 30 days after Election Day to ensure everything was done properly and certify election results. That deadline has changed since the signing of Assembly Bill 3184. The certification date for the general election is now Dec. 3 for all California counties.

“On Dec. 3, we’ll send our official results up to the California secretary of state, and that will be the end of the official process,” said Levey.

Levey said that doesn’t necessarily mean elections officials are tabulating ballots until Dec. 3, but if a voter wanted to “cure” their ballot, they would have the opportunity to do up until Dec. 1. According to Levey, a voter may choose to cure or correct a vote by mail ballot if it is determined a signature doesn’t match, isn’t clear enough or a voter forgot to sign a vote by mail ballot.

Additional information including drop box locations and in-person voting locations can be found on the Merced County website.

This story was originally published October 25, 2024 at 6:00 AM with the headline "More than 16,000 early-voting ballots received by Merced County ahead of election."