Life of a ballot: How Orange County’s votes are counted, verified and stored

You’ve slid your ballot through the small slit of a large, bright yellow box.

Or maybe you popped it in your mailbox, raising the red flag for the postman to collect. Or perhaps you’ve walked into a vote center, stood at a walled-off desk and painstakingly colored in bubbles on a ballot.

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But what happens next?

It may seem like magic, but really it’s a host of Orange County election workers — about 2,000 people were hired for the June primary election in Orange County, Registrar of Voters Bob Page said — who painstakingly remove ballots from envelopes, ensure bubbles are filled in correctly so the votes are properly counted, help residents obtain a replacement ballot or cast a provisional one, make sure someone does not vote twice and much, much more.

There are more than 125 steps election workers take in all, Page said, to ensure every election is accurate and secure.

Part of that work includes removing ballots from their envelopes and flattening them to prepare for counting. While a normal step, it’s one that is slower this year because Orange County’s ballots are 17 inches long to fit all 61 gubernatorial candidates on one page.

That makes this the longest ballot ever for Orange County — typically they run at 14 inches, Page said — and some voters have been a bit creative in how they folded them back into their envelopes, Page noted. So workers are taking extra care to smooth those out and make sure they have not been damaged by the machine that extracts them.

“Certainly one of the biggest issues about elections is how complicated they are,” said Orange County District Attorney Todd Spitzer, who was part of a group that got a behind-the-scenes look at the life cycle of a ballot on Wednesday, May 27.

“Counting ballots and overseeing this process is a very technical and intensive responsibility,” Spitzer said.

Every registered voter in California is mailed a ballot about a month before Election Day. In Orange County, nearly 2 million ballots were mailed out to voters 29 days before June 2.

Orange County voters can choose to mail their ballot back, place it in one of the 128 large drop boxes around the county or vote in person at a vote center. Nearly 40 vote centers scattered around the county are already open; another 152 will open on Saturday, May 30.

Here’s a snapshot of what happens next.

Ballots are collected

Teams of two head out to vote centers and drop boxes to collect ballots, with a lengthy checklist to ensure they are collected securely and with confidence.

There are 128 drop boxes around Orange County, made of thick, durable steel and bolted into the ground, weighing in at more than 1,000 pounds. Ballots are collected from drop boxes daily by the two-person teams, whose locations are tracked at all times by the GPS on their phones.

Once at a drop box, the team must use a radio to call into the command center to let them know they have arrived. They use the unique key assigned to a specific box and remove and seal the bag of ballots from inside. They then must add a new, empty bag for ballots and check to make sure the fire suppression device in the box is still intact.

After the team closes and locks the drop box, a numbered sticker seal is then placed across the door.

Throughout this whole process, the team is taking photos, documenting all these steps — including a picture of the key once they are back in the car, a guardrail to ensure keys aren’t left behind in the boxes. The photos are sent in, and the command center is updated that ballots have been secured.

The team is not allowed to go to the next box until the registrar’s dispatch team reviews the photos and gives the go-ahead.

“They cannot go visit the next box until the chain of custody steps have been followed, and we confirm that they’ve done what they are supposed to do,” Page said.

Ballots cast at vote centers are taken to the registrar’s office or regional collection sites. A two-person team, also monitored with GPS tracking and with safeguards in place, will pick up the ballots from the regional collection sites and bring them to the registrar’s office in Santa Ana.

If an Orange County resident votes in person at a vote center, they first check in with an election worker, who makes sure they haven’t already voted and locates the voter’s precinct — there are 2,367 precincts in Orange County — so they’ll get the correct ballot. The poll book, the electronic roster, is not connected to any of the voting equipment.

A voter must sign under penalty of perjury that they are who they say they are. They are handed a receipt with a precinct number that they present to another worker, who prints out a ballot.

“Those systems have to stay completely separate under state law,” Page said. “The electronic rosters have to be connected securely to the internet, so if somebody goes to one vote center and then to another, by the time they hit the second vote center, we’ve already told all the vote centers that this person has voted.”

“Or if we get a vote-by-mail ballot in our office, and we run it through the sorter the first time and scan it and give them participation credit, that information is getting pushed out in real time as well, so that voter can’t show up at a vote center and try to vote a second time,” he said.

Ballots are sorted

Vote-by-mail ballots are placed in one of four mail sorters, which scan the bar code on the return envelope and take a photo of the voter’s signature.

Signatures are checked

Photos of signatures are sent electronically to a team in a different section of the registrar’s office, who then compare the signatures on the ballot’s envelope to all the signatures on file for the voter.

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The teams look for similarities, not exact matches, Page said.

In order to challenge a signature, a team of three people has to agree that there are significant enough differences between the signature on the ballot envelope and those on file. If that happens, the voter must be sent a first-class letter the next business day to let them know there is an issue, which can also happen if a voter forgot to sign their ballot envelope.

For this primary election, voters have until June 24 at 5 p.m. to cure — or correct — any signature issues.

If a signature is deemed still to be significantly different from what is on file, a ballot could still be rejected and not counted, Page said.

Ballots are sorted — again

Once signatures have been checked, ballots go back to the sorter, Page said, this time separating the ones that have been accepted to continue on the process from the ones that are being challenged.

The ones that are accepted are run through a machine that shakes the envelopes — this makes the ballot sink to the bottom of the envelope — and slices them open. A worker then removes the ballot and checks to ensure it hasn’t been sliced or damaged by the extracting machine.

Ballots are prepared

Another team of workers inspects every ballot, flattening them and removing creases in preparation to be scanned. They flag if there is an issue, such as if a ballot has been damaged during the extraction process or if a voter circled their candidates rather than filling in the bubbles.

They also check all the envelopes, making sure no ballots are left behind.

“And they get quite excited if they find one,” Page said. A loud cheer erupts whenever a missing ballot has been found in an envelope.

“They play an important role every election to make sure our scanners work properly and that people’s votes are counted accurately,” Page said.

Issues are addressed

If a voter shows up to a vote center and is adamant that they have not voted — but the system shows they have — election workers won’t argue. Instead, they’ll give the person a provisional ballot, which won’t be counted until it’s determined that the person has not, in fact, already voted.

But if someone is found to be attempting to vote more than once, their name will be passed on to the Orange County District Attorney’s office.

Spitzer said his office has investigated these types of cases, and in general, someone simply forgot they already sent in a mailed ballot, or voters in the same household accidentally switched envelopes.

“We’re more than happy to look at it,” Spitzer said, “because the last thing we want is any kind of fraud. But the fact of the matter is, most of the time, it’s just an innocent thing.”

If a ballot was damaged during the extraction process — or is otherwise not marked correctly — the vote is still counted.

One person will copy all the votes from the ballot that cannot be scanned onto a new ballot. A second person will then audit the marks to make sure the votes were accurately transferred onto the duplicate ballot.

Because of state law related to ballot curing, Page is not allowed to certify election results until June 26. In previous elections, Orange County certified results sooner than that, Page said.

If a voter runs into an issue and believes there is imminent violence or something could get out of control, Spitzer said to call 911. Otherwise, his office has a hotline where voters can report potential fraud: 714-721-7578.

While election fraud is fairly rare, Spitzer said his office makes sure it doesn’t become a rampant issue.

“If you cheat, we’re going to catch you,” he said. “And I can assure you, we’re going to prosecute you. In this county, you don’t get a pass for voter fraud.”

“I’m fairly confident,” Spitzer said, “with a high degree of certainty, that we have fraud-free elections here in Orange County.”

Votes are counted

In a glass room — called the tally room — votes are added up. It’s a secured room with limited physical access.

The registrar’s office will first post early voting results at 8:05 p.m. on June 2 on its website, ocvote.gov. The next set of results will then be posted at 9:30 p.m., with more results coming every 30 minutes until every vote center ballot is counted.

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