Why Is the County Vote Going Slow?
Alameda County is down to 17,085 uncounted votes as of Friday afternoon, November 15, catching up rapidly after a slow start, leading to them being called America’s slowest vote-counting county.
As of Thursday afternoon, before Friday’s vote update, the county had led the state in the number of uncounted vote-by-mail ballots, according to the California Secretary of State’s daily uncounted ballot report. However, the Friday update showed several large counties with more uncounted votes.
The uncounted votes can have a wide-reaching impact, such as the Alameda County Board of Supervisors District 5 race, in which Oakland City Councilmember Nikki Fortunato Bas was leading Emeryville City Councilmember John Bauters by 106 votes, up in the air.
In San Leandro’s District 2, city council incumbent Bryan Azevedo led challenger and former councilmember Ed Hernandez by only 473 votes.
In most other races and measures in the county, uncounted votes were unlikely to change results.
Alameda County had only counted 5,000 ballots out of over 680,000 cast in its first reported vote update after the election. Registrar of Voters Tim Dupuis told the county board of supervisors at their November 12 meeting that “the public was not pleased.”
Outgoing District 5 Supervisor Keith Carson said in a November 8 press release, “Many have contacted my office to express their dismay/anger regarding the small number of votes that have been counted to date, while all of our surrounding counties are posting a greater number of results. I share your dismay.”
Dupuis said that Alameda County had been in line with other large California counties, of which nine of 16 still had undecided races. He added that his office then went on to count 95,000 more votes by that Friday, then 150,000 more over the Veterans Day weekend.
District 2 Supervisor Elisa Marquez asked why the vote count had been so slow. Dupuis responded, “That is because of a shift we made four years ago to being an all-vote-by-mail state.”
“We like that because it promotes voter participation and increased turnout. It is convenient,” Dupuis said. “But what we have seen in the last four years is that most voters tend to drop their ballots off in the last few days before the election, and our office gets inundated by vote-by-mail votes.”
In fact, he said, ballots are still arriving, having been postmarked on Election Day—November 5—or earlier, as legally required for them to count.
He said Alameda County's election workload also increased because two cities allow underage voting for school district choices, four cities use ranked-choice voting, and two different recalls on the ballot this time, one for District Attorney Pamela Price and the other for Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao.
Dupuis also said that vote-by-mail ballots require extra work at the Registrar’s office compared to votes cast on machines. They arrive unstructured, in bags or on trolleys, and must be prepared for machine processing.
Ballots are sorted and put in trays in the same orientation before signatures are verified. Then, their envelopes are opened, and they are sorted again and set up for high-speed scanning, he said.
If any votes are not correctly marked or have extraneous marks, the whole batch has to be removed and examined by two-person teams, and then the good ballots are re-scanned and tallied.
“You’d be amazed what people put on their ballots,” the Registrar of Voters said.