KCRA 3 held a roundtable with registrars from four area counties about their efforts in the lead-up to the General Election.
SACRAMENTO, Calif. —
Election officials across Northern California are preparing for the Nov. 3 election, training workers, expanding voting operations and urging voters to cast their ballots early.
KCRA 3 held a roundtable with registrars from four area counties about their efforts in the lead-up to the election: Yolo County Registrar Jesse Salinas, San Joaquin County Registrar Olivia Hale and Armando Salud-Ambriz from Nevada County and Sacramento County elections official Ken Casparis.
As far as ramping up their county’s counting teams, Salinas said his office is focused on making sure his team knows what to do.
“Well, right now we’re actually doing training. We’re going to training all our election workers,” he said. “We’re getting ready to actually get prepared for all the election centers that are about to open up in a few weeks.”
The same goes for Casparis in Sacramento County. “Yeah, absolutely. We’re still training all of our vote center workers,” he said. “We’re also getting ready for some outreach events. We’re going to be at some community events throughout the election, just encouraging people to vote and vote early.”
“We don’t have to hire any new folks,” Salud-Ambriz said. “It’s the folks that want to continue working with us, just always great because continuity of operations, just even better in Nevada County, we actually have early voting taking place starting today.”
Our roundtable was held on the same day that California Attorney General Rob Bonta spoke in Sacramento to assure voters that the election is “business as usual.”
“We will not tolerate efforts to intimidate voters or interfere with the electoral process,” Bonta said.
“So we’ve had people reach out and ask questions about ICE”, Salinas said, “but we haven’t really had a reason to be concerned about it, simply because we know that it’s not, has not been an issue in past elections, and we don’t anticipate that being an election issue this time around either. And quite frankly, we are also training all of our election workers to de-escalate anything that may come up. So we’re preparing accordingly.”
“I think the biggest thing is offering all the opportunities to return your ballots”, said Hale, reminding voters of their options. ” So for voters, as long as they know they have, official dropboxes, they have USPS, they have the ability to come into our office for early voting or to any of our polling sites to drop off that ballot.”
Some counties participate in the Voter’s Choice Act, that expands in-person voting and the ability to vote at any polling place, and those counties have seen a difference.
“I mean, I think in Nevada County, we were one of the Fabulous Five alongside Sacramento County. It’s continuously been an incredible improvement,” Salud-Ambriz said. “We’re going from … nine traditional polling locations to 18. So we continue to expand services, which is always a great thing thanks to the Voter’s Choice.”
“We’re one of the early adopters,” Casparis said. “So, I think our voters are used to it, and we do see a lot of early turnout. We’d like to see more, and we’re going to encourage more people to vote early. But yeah, we’ve got more than 90 vote centers that we open throughout the community. And, more than 60 ballot drop boxes. So people definitely use them.”
There’s also the lingering question of ballot turnaround time. The state recently appropriated $40 million to counties to help speed up election results.
“We have not received it, but we already spent it,” Salud-Ambriz said. “We expanded our office operations, allowing us to create more tabulators or county machines. So in our county, we are expanding the amount of services and to hopefully speed up the process.”
And the key to speed in this election, like any election in California, said Hale, is to get your ballot in as early as possible.
“If you educate our voters, spending time with them to explain the different options and the way they can vote early and help us, assist us with getting the vote count done accurately and as efficiently as possible. That’s what we’re doing,” Hale said.
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