California election officials cope with ballot glitches and vote count challenges as election draws to a close

Despite reports of ink-spoiled ballots and challenges to how votes are tallied, election officials up and down California said they are confident they can accurately count and certify the millions of votes that are expected to be cast this week.

“I am feeling pretty good. Every bit of our operation has gone very smoothly,” Natalie Adona, the registrar of voters in Nevada County, said Monday morning, despite having to buy a jeweler’s loop to see the flea-sized ink specks spoiling as many as 10% of mailed ballots. She called it “an annoyance.”

The printing glitch, called overspray, also marred as many as half of the mailed ballots collected by Monday in Shasta County.

Such garden variety mishaps are common, and not expected to derail California’s election process, even as heated rhetoric and attempts to interfere with vote certification ratchet up across the country.

Election officials here said they too expected local rejections of the vote or demands that ballots be counted by hand — even though state law mandates machine counting and only county registrars, not political boards, have the power to certify election results.

“It’s kind of silly,” said Yolo County Registrar Jesse Salinas, commenting on efforts to convince some county boards to interfere with the acceptance of voting results. “We don’t need that drama but its going to be there.”

In Shasta and Nevada counties, flecks of ink marring the bar codes printed on some ballots prevented voting machines made by Hart InterCivic from correctly reading those ballots.

Registrars in the two northern California counties began the painstaking task of transferring votes from unreadable ballots to duplicates that can be read by machine, a process that requires hand checking and has significantly slowed down the count. By Monday morning, Adona had a backlog of 20,000 ballots awaiting processing. Shasta County Registrar Thomas Toller said his office was reprocessing ballots at a speed of about 700 an hour.

Both registrars thought they could finish the job in time to certify the county’s presidential election results by the Dec. 3 deadline. But Toller was also navigating a contentious environment, where election dramas have fed into, and drawn support from, national election denial crusaders including MyPillow.com Chief Executive Mike Lindell.

“I’ve had observers show up who are understandably upset that this has happened. I’ve also had members of the community who ... just want to support my staff,” Toller said Monday. “So far they have been fairly civil to each other, haven’t had any shouting matches.

“That’s one of my goals — to keep the civil tone, and cool down the ardor of our observers.”

Shasta County has been a hotbed of conspiracy theories about election fraud for several years. In 2023, the board of supervisors voted to dump Dominion voting machines and attempted to switch to hand counting, triggering a new state law mandating machine reading in all but the smallest election contests (such as general elections with fewer than 1,000 voters).

In 2022, the Shasta board only narrowly, on a 3-2 vote, agreed to accept the registrar’s certification of the state primary, and it created an advisory election commission to continue to prod and investigate.

The advisory panel now seeks to audit the March primary, and one of its members in October joined a political separatist group in presenting the county with a “cease and desist” letter declaring the California election process to be “fraudulent.”

Shasta County Supervisor Tim Garman said it would not surprise him if the ultraconservative majority attempted to reject the election results this time around.

“We have a bunch of people up here who don’t believe in elections, and we have a few of our supervisors who could go along with that thinking and refuse to certify,” he said.

Garman said the county’s lawyer assures him that no matter how rancorous the debate, the vote by the county board is symbolic: all that matters is the registrar’s certification.

Secretary of State Shirley Weber confirmed that belief. She said her office is keeping a close watch on the situation in Shasta County, and is poised to send additional election monitors if dissent jeopardizes the vote.

“Thus far they’re doing a pretty good job,” Weber said Monday. “But there may be other [issues] that come up, and when they do, we’ll respond to them rather quickly.”

California gives county registrars 28 days — until Dec. 3 — to certify and publicly post local election results of presidential races. The deadline for other political contests is a few days later.

Those certified results go to the secretary of state, who has until Dec. 7 to certify the statewide result to the governor and presidential electors. Only New York, Oregon and Texas have later presidential certification deadlines.

Local board acceptance is immaterial in California and normally handled as a point of information. Some county boards may not even see the results until January, while in other counties it is bound to attract heated debate.

After the March primary, citizens appeared before the Orange County Board of Supervisors for an hour to allege illegal voting, political corruption and other “nefarious behavior.” At the end of that hour, the board accepted the registrar’s election report without discussion.

California registrars contacted by The Times said that from their perspective, the November election was proceeding without major hiccups.

“It is very much like all our other elections,” said Santa Cruz County Registrar Tricia Webber.

Normal, however, also includes a measure of dissent and distrust.

The California chapter of the Election Integrity Project, a vote-watch group that trains poll observers while perpetuating claims of electoral corruption, has filed a petition in Sacramento County Superior Court seeking a special master to take over certification of California’s voting results.

The group’s writ of mandate claims “discrepancies” between November 2022 election results and its own analysis of June 2023 voter rolls. No hearing date has been set.

The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in August rejected similar claims from the organization as it sought to invalidate the 2020 California election. The appellate panel said the group provided a “limited factual basis” and even if its claims were true, the number of alleged invalid votes was “so exceedingly minute as to have no measurable impact on the fundamental fairness or integrity of California’s elections.”

“Evidence will expose election corruption,” the Election Integrity Project persisted in alleging in its California newsletter on Oct. 30, alongside links to pro-Donald Trump conspiracy theorists Lindell and Steve Bannon.

Registrars in at least 12 counties also reported receiving “cease and desist” letters from members of New California State, a group seeking to split the state along rural versus urban political ideologies.

They claim the 2020 election was “fraudulent” and assert that the 2024 election’s use of machines to tally votes is illegal. In Shasta County, the letter was presented by Patty Plumb, a member of the advisory commission, who said the machine tally jeopardized the county board’s “certification of the vote” — even though the board does not have that legal power.

“Certifying uncertifiable elections in a federal election can reach the level of treason,” Plumb and supporters read from the letter. “Do not assume just because county election officials have not been held accountable to this point that they will not be held accountable now and in the future.”

“I marked it ‘received,’ and put it in the file,” said Fresno County Registrar of Voters James Kus, adding that he then went about his busy work of conducting the election.

“We did not respond ... as there is no legal authority for New California to make this demand,” Orange County Registrar of Voters Bob Page said about the letter in a reply to The Times on Sunday night by email.

During the busy monthlong canvassing period that begins after polls close Tuesday, election workers will continue to scan ballots, verify voter signatures on ballot envelopes, collect late-arriving overseas ballots, adjudicate provisional votes and give voters whose ballots might be rejected a chance to fix errors or contest decisions.

In addition, California requires a post-election audit, a manual tally of at least 1% of precincts, chosen at random.

In the meantime, election observers called for a measure of trust.

“Hitches will occur. These things happen every election.... They may be mischaracterized or blown out of proportion on social media,” Common Cause President Virginia Kase Solomon said Monday. She cautioned against taking the bait. “It is up to us not to spread the disinformation.”