How does it work?
Fresnoland takes a look at how your vote will be counted after the polls close on Nov. 5.
Fresno County has two processes to count ballots — one for those cast in-person at vote centers or at the downtown elections office, the other for ballots sent by mail.
For ballots cast at a vote center, there’s a tabulation machine on-site that scans your ballot in front of you and adds the results to that location’s total, right then and there at that moment.
“We do ask you to hang out for about eight seconds or so, hear the ding, and that tells you that the machine has scanned it and counted it, and your process is done,” said James Kus, Fresno County’s registrar of voters and county clerk, in an Oct. 18 interview on the Fresnolandia podcast.
For ballots either mailed to the post office or deposited at a county dropbox, those ballots are collected by county elections staff and brought to their central elections warehouse in southeast Fresno.
Each ballot is scanned, capturing the voter’s information and signature. County elections workers — not machines — look at the signature and compare it to the signature the voter has on file with the elections office to make sure they match.
“And if several humans agree that those signatures don’t compare, (the registration signature), we use your history of registration signatures and your signature on your envelope, then we’ll put your ballot into a status, a challenged status,” Kus added.
The signature has to match the one you have on record when you registered to vote, not any signature the government may have, including your drivers’ license.
If your ballot is marked as ‘challenged,’ then county elections workers will send you a letter, and will call or email you if they have that information on file. Voters have until the day county officials have to certify the election under state law — Dec. 5, this year — to fix, or ‘cure,’ their vote by returning the letter or following the instructions on this website.
If the signature is accepted, the envelope is opened and the ballot is separate from the envelope.
“And it’s important to know that at that point there, we can never go back. The ballot is now going to be counted because I can never attach that ballot to the voter again. While it’s in the envelope, I can attach the ballot to the voter. I don’t look at that ballot because it’s a secret ballot. But going forward, there’s never a connection from the ballot back to you as the voter. And that’s the whole part of your voting being secret in California,” Kus added.
The ballots get unfolded and ran through the tabulation machines in batches of 250.
People have been allowed to watch and observe county elections workers counting ballots at the elections warehouse for the past few weeks, through Election Day.
How does Fresno County prevent ineligible people from voting?
In Fresno County, voters must be at least 18 years old and a U.S. citizen. You can’t register to vote without providing your name, residence, birthdate, and an identification number — a social security number or a California ID or California driver’s license — and sign under penalty of perjury.
“As we’ve actually seen in Fresno and across the state, just that document itself is sufficient. If you fib on that, if you lie, if you commit perjury on that, local DAs in Fresno County and across the state will charge you for falsifying your registration,” Kus said.
Bryant said that cases of voter impersonation or falsifying registration are incredibly rare across the country.
“And the thing is that if you’re an undocumented citizen living in the United States, most of the time you do everything you can to lay low, and limit your engagement with law enforcement and especially federal law enforcement.
“It’s a political football,” she added. “It’s an easy claim for people to throw out and to sow seeds of doubt and decrease trust in elections, but the simplest explanation is usually the most accurate explanation. There are just so many checks.”
Why counting ballots takes longer in California
While there could be as many as 200,000 ballots counted before 8 p.m. on Election Day (when polls close) —- no one sees the results until then, Kus said.
“California wants to make sure that every voter has the opportunity to vote the way they want to vote, when they want to vote. And that means we will accept all of the vote-by-mail ballots, and all the in-person ballots, all the way to 8 (p.m.) on Election Day, plus anything that has been postmarked on Election Day,” Kus said.
Some ballots are even being delivered as much as seven days after Election Day, he added.
Last minute ballots are common in Fresno County.
“For the last three major elections, we’ve had over half of our ballots returned by vote-by-mail on Election Day or the day before Election Day, Kus added.
As of Nov. 4, Political Data, Inc. was reporting 161,747 ballots returned in Fresno County – or 31% of registered voters.
Will we hit record turnout like we did in 2020?
Fresno County hit record voter turnout levels of nearly 75% in the 2020 presidential election – but local elections expert and Fresno State political science professor Lisa Bryant is not optimistic we’ll hit that record again.
“I think that we’ll fall somewhere between 2016 and 2020. I think that it will probably be a little bit higher than 2016 because of the changes that we’ve had moving to the Voter Choice Act and everybody getting a mail ballot. The move to vote centers has made voting a little bit easier and having the ballot at your house.
“In 2020, remember, people were home and so you’re bored, so you may as well research and fill out your ballot. So in 2024 we’re combating that sort of idea that people have time constraints and sometimes they forget. Forgetting about your ballot is the number one reason people give for not voting, but I think the main thing about this year is enthusiasm doesn’t seem to be as high as it was in 2020.”
How will election winners be declared?
For local races, Fresnoland’s editorial team takes a very cautious and measured approach, collecting election data from the Fresno County Elections website. We will report projected winners only after careful consideration of the data against the number of ballots left to be counted.
Very rarely does this result in election ‘winners’ being announced early on Tuesday evening.
For state and national races, we defer to the Associated Press. The United States doesn’t have a nationwide body that collects and releases election results. Instead, journalists gather data from local and state agencies that report election results publicly. The Associated Press gathers this data and makes it available to the public and to other newsrooms, to count the votes and then declare winners. They’ve been doing this in presidential elections since 1848. Learn more about that role here.
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