With the Nov. 4 special election on the horizon, best practices for voting can seem opaque, especially to first-time voters. Although the official registration deadline closed on Oct. 20, there’s still time to register and get your vote in.
“You would just need to either visit our office down in South Sacramento or one of the vote centers when they open on Oct. 25 or Nov. 1,” said Ken Casparis, Sacramento County’s voter registration spokesperson. “You essentially just register to vote that day, cast your ballot that day, and your ballot comes back to us the way it normally would.”
Polling Places
(Map produced by Ruth Finch)
However, if you already have a ballot sitting in your mailbox or on your kitchen counter, you may not want to wait to send it in or find a dropbox. The earlier a voter sends a ballot in, the more time they have to correct any issues that may arise with their ballot.
Kim Alexander, president of the California Voter Foundation, talked about the most common ways mail-in ballots get rejected and if they can be corrected.
“We can protect ballots from being rejected if there's a signature problem, but we can't do anything about a ballot that arrives too late to be counted,” Alexander said. “ Fill it out, send it in, drop it in your mailbox. There's really no reason to delay. Get it done.”
Issues typically arise with signatures that don't match what they have on file, Alexander said, usually the voter’s driver’s license signature.
“If there is an issue with your signature, it gives your elections office and you time to deal with it before election day,” Alexander said. “But sadly, a lot of voters lose their interest in curing their ballots after election day.”
If you’re not able to vote early, that doesn’t mean you necessarily have to vote in person.
“We always encourage people to vote early but for those who may forget to fill out their ballot before election day here in Sacramento County, we're close enough to a mail processing facility that it shouldn't be a problem getting your ballot postmarked on time,” Casparis said.
According to Ryan Ronco, Placer County’s Clerk-Recorder-Registrar of Voters, voters in rural areas, or even certain urban areas of California won’t want to wait as long.
“If you are 50 miles, and not 50 miles as the crow flies, but 50 miles as the roads travel from [the closest USPS facility] or more,” Ronco said, “then your envelopes are no longer being postmarked the same day that you put them into the mail. They go to your regional post office, they wait there for essentially a day or half a day, and then they get over to the hub where they're postmarked.”
If voters want to ensure it's postmarked for the same day, they can bring it to a postal worker at their local post office and request it. With growing concerns over ballots being rejected, tampered with, or not reaching the USPS facilities on time, Casparis recommends their ballot tracking system.
“The Secretary of State's office has their ballot tracking program and that'll send you alerts when your ballot hits the mail stream on the way back to the office… There's a chain of custody for all of those ballot dropbox bags when they pick them up,” Casparis said. “We have tamperproof security tags on them so we've got security built into every single system and process at the elections office. It's always top of mind for us.”
However, ballots getting stolen or tampered with may not be as big of an issue as voters might think. This is due in part to the election policy’s concern with ensuring voters’ ballots have an accurate signature.
“The number of cases where somebody has actually voted somebody else's ballot in our state is in the single digits,” Alexander said. “So, when it happens, it does get discovered and people are prosecuted for it.”
If you prefer voting in-person, or are worried about your mail-in ballot reaching the USPS hub on time, you can find your nearest polling site on the Secretary of State website.
“The main thing we want people to do is to make sure they've got a plan for when and how and where they're going to do it,” Alexander said, “And get it done sooner rather than later if they can.“
Additional reporting by Greg Micek.
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