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While the Nov. 4 statewide special election on Prop. 50 will feature fewer polling places, reduced voting hours and half the usual number of drop boxes in San Benito County, it will see improvements in ballot security and the election process overall.
For the county Elections Department, security starts with the dropboxes. Each metal-encased box is anchored in four feet of concrete, and there are design elements to defeat any attempt to fish a ballot out of the small insertion slit. All boxes now have 24-hour video monitoring, and staff continuously reviews the footage.
County Registrar of Voters Francisco Diaz said the public, by appointment, is welcome to come to the office to view the footage and (perhaps) observe the only real issue the office has: people dropping their PG&E bills in the boxes, which are dutifully forwarded to the utility company.
As of Oct. 28—the date of this interview and the start of in-person voting, 4,012 ballots had been received via the four active drop boxes, plus 145 from in-person voting. In addition, about 4,000 mail-in ballots have also been received, bringing the total to over 8,000.
San Benito County has more than 37,000 registered voters.
Once a ballot is cast or received by dropbox or mail, each must be hand verified by at least three observers to guarantee the signature is authentic. For this election, the number of observers has been increased to between four and five.
Of those 4,157 ballots, 180 were rejected for various reasons: no signature (46), deceased (2, sent back uncast by the family), no address (1) and signatures that did not match (131).
Verifying signatures has been made easier by a recent upgrade to the elections office software, which provides access to a database containing images of all official documents the registered voter has signed in the county, including previous ballot envelopes, legal and DMV records, and petitions.
“We review the signatures,” Diaz said, “first, to make sure it’s the right person who signed it, but second, to ensure that our approach gives the voter the benefit of doubt as to who is signing before we automatically reject it.”
Diaz said that includes trying to find “every single letter, initial, period, slant, anything that goes upward, downward, and all the little things within the signature.”
Elections Department associate Liz Avila said that any ballots initially rejected for lacking a matching signature are rechecked twice before being formally rejected. As a practical test, this reporter signed a blank sheet and gave it to Avila to verify.
A database query returned 17 of my signatures, along with the location of my voting district. Though the signatures varied to a significant degree, Avila was able to identify several common characteristics among them, such as the way the first “R” in “Robert” was drawn.
Avila offered two examples of rejected signatures and explained the reasons why. In one example, the signature in previous examples spelled out the person’s middle name, while in the challenged signature, it was abbreviated to just the first letter. In another example, a signature that was usually made in block letters was challenged because the submitted signature was in cursive.
“Sometimes it becomes an issue,” she said, “because another member of the household might have signed it. Sometimes a person just changes the way they sign their name. But any significant difference will call that ballot into question.”
Disputed ballots are not automatically discarded. The elections office reaches out to the voter by phone, letter, email or text, asking them to come to the elections office to verify their identity with a driver’s license or other valid ID. The voter can also register a newer version of their signature if they have changed it significantly, to avoid challenges in the future.
The voter’s information is entered into a spreadsheet that records the date of contact and the method used. Avila said the office will continue to reach out at least four times until the verification cutoff date, one month after the election.
Once the ballots are accepted and verified, they are stored, along with the election machinery, in a secure caged area at the elections office, which is also being fitted with a video surveillance system.
“While we’re gone,” Diaz said, “and everything’s locked, we want to make sure we’re recording all the movement in case there is any sort of tampering or anybody goes in who is not authorized.”
On election night, the vote processing facility at the elections office will be open to observers who will be free to watch every part of the proceedings from a short distance, including on-site signature verifications. There will also be, according to Diaz, observers from the Democratic and Republican parties, an elections integrity group, the California Secretary of State and Disability Rights California.
The U.S. Department of Justice announced it intended to send observers to selected voting locations in California, though Diaz said San Benito County was not included in the list of sites they intend to visit.
“Observers is not anything new,” Diaz said. “Every observer that comes in, we greet them, we welcome them. My hope is that people come out to vote and have a civil election. And after this election’s over, we’re still going to be neighbors and friends.”
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