Vote-by-mail ballots slow Yuba County tallying

Primary turnout of 34% and rising

More than one-third of Yuba County’s 32,745 registered voters submitted ballots in the June Primary – a turnout of 34 percent – and that number will continue to rise as the election’s office finishes tallying another thousand or so unprocessed ballots this week.

“Everything is going smoothly. We were just not expecting so many vote-by-mail ballots to be dropped off at the polls,” said Terry Hansen, Yuba County clerk and registrar of voters. “The numbers were just overwhelming.”

According to the county’s most recent tally, just over 3,000 people voted at polling locations on election day – a turnout of about 9 percent. The rest – or nearly 8,200 people – voted by mail. Hansen and her team of 13 people has spent the past several days going through those vote-by-mail ballots that were turned in on election day – a very time-consuming, labor-intensive process, she said.

Hansen said she isn’t sure why so many people seem to be waiting until election day to submit vote-by-mail ballots – it could be procrastination, problems with postage, or a number of different things. Either way, Hansen said it’s important for voters to get those ballots in early so the process of tallying results from election night runs much more quickly.

“We had a number of races with three candidates, locally,

and those races are still undecided,” she said. “I sympathize for them, because all candidates want to know what’s happening with the vote, but we need to do it right on our end and that takes time.”

Hansen said her office has just over 1,000 unprocessed ballots still needing review. Many of them are provisional ballots, a number of them are damaged ballots that the machine couldn’t read.

“We are feeling we will be done with processing all of the ballots by the end of the week,” Hansen said.

After that, her team will work to make the results official – which requires a 1 percent hand-count for every race or proposition in the county – which could take another week or two, she said.

Most races too close to call

Not much has changed in terms of local contested races, when comparing the most recent results with those released at the end of election night.

The only race that has been decided is for sheriff, with Wendell Anderson receiving 76 percent of the vote, beating out opponent Teng Saechao by more than 5,400 votes.

Supervisor races appear to be headed for runoff elections.

In District 1, incumbent Andy Vasquez leads the race with 42 percent of the vote. His opponent in the runoff election will likely be Joan Saunders, who has received 32 percent of the vote. Saunders is still only 99 votes ahead of third place David Joyce.

In District 5, the race for second place is much closer. Incumbent Randy Fletcher received 44 percent of the vote. In second, currently, is John Mistler, who received 1,074 votes. Alton Wright is close behind, receiving 1,055 votes.

For the assessor race, it appeared on election night Steve Duckels would win the race without needing a runoff against his opponents, but with the most recent update the gap continues to tighten. Duckels currently has 51 percent of the vote – enough to prevent a runoff – but second place Steve Souza continues to close the gap, currently receiving 32 percent of the vote.