Central Coast elections officials still counting ballots

UPDATE 6/13/2016 6 PM:

Elections offices around the Central Coast are now in “canvass” mode. It’s a way to maintain integrity through an election. Elections employees are checking, and in some cases double-checking, ballots, equipment and polling sites.

The Santa Cruz County Elections Department still has tens of thousands of vote-by-mail ballots that need to be processed. It’s a lengthy but careful operation to make sure every vote counts.

“Sometimes they spill things on their ballot and that’s not going to go through the scanner well. So this is what they’re doing: inspecting them, getting them flattened and ready to go through the count,” said Santa Cruz County Clerk Gail Pellerin.

The operation takes longer when human interaction is needed.

“Our voters who didn’t quite make that arrow connection and instead decided to circle the name of the candidate, that needs to be duplicated and remade onto a ballot that can be read through the machine,” said Gina Martinez, with the Monterey County Elections Office.

This is going on as elections offices audit the entire elections process.

“We’re looking at 28,000-plus of those (ballots) that need to get added to the count,” Pellerin explained. “And then we have the complete audit of the polling sites, so every polling site gets audited as far as how many ballots they’ve received, how many they used. We verified how many came in from the polls. Then we do our provisional research as well. We haven’t even started that. So we have to get into our provisional research and see if our voters are eligible to vote and if they are, we get in and count or partially count their votes. Then our operations center is doing the whole audit of the voting equipment and verifying the security and accuracy of all the equipment. And then we have the actual ballots going through the counting machines, so, lot of people, lot of activity. It doesn’t happen quickly. We take our time because we want to do it right. We want to make sure it’s accurate.”

And as mandated by law, elections offices must recount some elections.

The results of the elections should be certified by the first week of July.

ORIGINAL POST:

Local election officials still have some work to do before June 7th election results are certified. Santa Cruz County Clerk Gail Pellerin says there are more than 28,000 ballots still to be counted. Most of the uncounted ballots are Vote by Mail ballots which were postmarked on time but received after Election Day. Officials will also do random recounts, as required by state law. Updated results are expected sometime this week.

KION’s Mariana Hicks will have more on this story tonight at 5 and 6 p.m..