Quick Take
Santa Cruz County Clerk Tricia Webber and her team of volunteers and staffers hunkered down for a busy Tuesday as primary election ballots rolled in.
Santa Cruz County Clerk Tricia Webber arrived at the government center bright and early at 6 a.m. Tuesday to begin receiving, counting and processing ballots. And she and her team of volunteers and other full-time staff expected to work well into the evening, making for a marathon Election Day.
Webber trained the six new volunteers on-site to receive and sort the ballots by hand. The volunteers are given a stipend for their time.
“You’re going to take everything out of your box and get it onto the table. And then once it’s empty, you’re going to push it off to the side and start separating everything inside your box,” she explained to them.
There are three different types of ballots: vote-by-mail, in-person ballots and electronic ballots, which are printed to be sorted. Electronic and handwritten in-person votes get sorted into piles after they are received, and all mail-in votes are sent to another room in the government building.
Kachina Addison, who has worked three elections as an extra helper, spent the day picking up and unlocking the drop boxes for votes by mail, as well as processing these ballots. She said there have to be at least two people wearing official badges that designate them as ballot retrievers when drop boxes get brought up, due to California protocol.
According to Webber, everyone who votes in person checks in and signs the voter’s oath, which means there are fewer steps involved to count an in-person vote than a mail-in one. Once staff receive and sort a mail-in ballot, they have to flatten it, make sure all of the excess tabs are torn off, and ensure the voter used blue or black ink pen and that there are no pen smudges along the ballot card ID that could disrupt the ballot sorting system.
“We want to make sure that people know how secure our whole system is, and it really is,” Addison said, “There’s always accountability.”
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