Thousands of California ballots cast in the election last November will never be counted. Late postmarks, questionable signatures and other anomalies doomed thousands of vote-by-mail ballots, as they do every year.
But at least 407 perfectly fine ballots also weren’t counted because of a snafu in Sacramento County, where election workers found an unopened, sealed bag of ballots sitting on a shelf in a warehouse.
The ballots were found two weeks ago and had the potential to affect races in 92 precincts, but none did.
County voter registrar Jill LaVine told the Sacramento Bee that the overlooked ballots were a casualty of a color-coded storage system that wasn’t properly executed. She said that an election worker at the Natomas Community Center, where voting had taken place, needed an extra bag for packing up ballots and was inadvertently given a red satchel, rather than pink.
Pink is for live ballots and red is for just about everything else, like envelopes, pens and registration cards. When the red bag made its way to the Elections Department, it was stuffed on a shelf and forgotten until workers started gathering materials in preparation for the next election.
The 407 ballots are a drop in the bucket compared to the number that don’t get counted for other reasons. ABC News reported that 6,000 late ballots in Los Angeles County alone failed to qualify for the count. Democratic state lawmakers tried to give election workers some latitude in counting mailed-in ballots that arrive on or shortly after Election Day, but were blocked by Republicans.
The issue could arise again now that Democrats have a super-majority. “I think it’s a dirty little secret that we're keeping from voters, quite frankly, this vote-by-mail ballots that are too late to get counted,” Kim Alexander of the California Voter Foundation told ABC.
–Ken Broder
To Learn More:
Warehouse Worker Finds Sacramento County Uncounted Ballots (by Loretta Kalb, Sacramento Bee)
California's Uncounted Mail-in Ballots Reach Thousands (by Nannette Miranda, ABC News)