In the 2024 election, California will take longer than usual to complete the election process. Starting a month before the election day on November 5, California began mailing out election guides and ballots. It will not be until over a month after Election Day, on December 13, that the Secretary of State’s office will confirm the election results. Riverside County has over 1.37 million registered voters, more than most counties in California, and is working on making the election process more transparent after appointing a new registrar of voters last year.
Elizabeth Florer, the Public Information Officer (PIO) of Riverside County, explained that the ballots go through a process she called the “lifecycle”. She mentioned that mailed-in ballots are received at the voter registration and counting center, where they are sorted by machines and the signatures on the envelopes are captured by photographs. If the signature matches the database information, it is considered valid. The ballots are then removed from the envelopes, flattened manually, and scanned on high-speed scanners. If there are any defects in the ballots or issues detected, they need to be duplicated: typically done in pairs where one person reads the original ballot and another marks on the machine to print a new one. If both candidates are marked, the intent cannot be determined, and the vote will not be counted.
Riverside County does not have specific requirements for observers. They only need to register their name and entry time at the entrance. Volunteer observers can stand behind barriers to watch the signature verification and ballot duplication operations, and they can raise challenges, and if problems are confirmed, a letter will be sent to verify if the ballot sender is indeed the correct person.
California also mandates a random selection of 1% of ballots to verify the accuracy of machine counting. In essence, while mail-in voting saves time on queuing to vote, the workload for counting increases significantly, leading to a long processing time.
Florer mentioned that Election Day on the 5th was extremely busy, with some employees arriving as early as 4 am to prepare for operations to commence by 7 am. Most staff worked from 7 am to 8 pm when the voting centers closed, while the ballot counters remained busy until the next morning at 7 am.
Riverside County has 150 polling centers with the first ballot collection truck returning around 8:30 am on the 5th and the last one coming back around 1:30 am. Staff had to ensure all the ballots were counted, some scanned into the chips at the polling stations, while others were brought back for scanning without an internet connection throughout the process.
As of the evening of the 9th, Riverside County had processed 53.4% of the ballots. With over 1.37 million registered voters in the county, nearly 610,000 ballots were mailed in, and over 125,000 were cast in person.
Florer revealed that there are public visiting hours next week on Tuesday and Thursday from 11 am to 12 pm and 4 pm to 5 pm. She stated, “When you see this process firsthand, it becomes easier to understand. We are committed to fair, accurate, and transparent elections, achieving 100% transparency.”
In mid-October last year, Art Tinoco was appointed as the interim registrar of voters by the Riverside County Board of Supervisors after working in the voter registration office since 2002, serving as the assistant registrar of voters for the past nine years. The Board confirmed him as the official registrar of voters in November of last year.
Former Registrar of Voters Rebecca Spencer resigned on September 29 last year and reached a settlement agreement with the Board. The County agreed to pay nearly $800,000 in exchange for her dropping any and all claims against them. As per the settlement agreement, the County, as her employer, deposited close to $65,000 into her retirement savings account and provided over $38,000 as compensation for various accrued leave balances.
Spencer, who had been interning in the election office since 1999 and had been the head of elections in Riverside County since 2014, was suspended in mid-September last year. Her attorney, Sanford Kassel, told the media that her suspension was “completely retaliatory and politically motivated”.
Riverside County District Attorney Michael A. Hestrin wrote a letter to the Board of Supervisors last year stating that Spencer’s baseless accusations and malicious insinuations indicate her desire to evade public scrutiny. His office had received complaints from voters about her policies or practices, and voter officials should welcome complaints or investigations of alleged violations to ensure voter confidence in the election process and correct any misconceptions about voters being deprived of their electoral rights.
Hestrin also mentioned in a television interview that since 2016, his office had received numerous complaints from Democrats, Republicans, and Independents, reporting unauthorized alterations to their voter information, leading to several dozen instances of such occurrences in Riverside County during the 2018 elections. Furthermore, during the 2016 elections, over seventy individuals attempted to vote twice, with a majority of them being senior citizens.
In 2023, the media exposed issues in the county’s elections. For instance, in the special elections in March 2021 for Cathedral City and Eastvale areas, over 11,000 mail-in ballots were received late but were included in the statistics. Spencer attributed the delay to a printing supplier failing to send incorrect notifications to the voter registration office.
During the 2020 presidential election, approximately 42,000 voters received more than one mail-in ballot. Spencer explained that this occurred when voters changed their registration information, and her office implemented safeguards to prevent any duplicates. The Board of Supervisors certified the results of that election. ◇