might stamp out inperson balloting
Success of postal voting during pandemic could alter California elections
The huge turnout and the record number of Californians who voted by mail in last week’s election could mean this was the final time people cast ballots in garages, school cafeterias and other spots that for decades have been neighborhood polling places.
Because of concerns about the coronavirus pandemic, every active voter in California received a ballot in the mail this fall. And what looks to be 80% of the more than 17 million voters used them.
Even the counties that clung to their traditional polling places found few voters willing to use them on election day.
In San Francisco, which had 588 polling places open for business, only 6% of its 443,000 voters cast their ballots in person in their local precincts, said John Arntz, the city’s elections director. Even the 43,000 people who dropped their mail ballots off at the polling places amounted to far fewer than in recent elections.
“This is likely the last pollingplace election in San Francisco,” said Arntz, who is scheduled to submit a plan to the Board of SuperviMail
sors in February about what would be needed to move to an allmail system.
The change can’t happen fast enough for Secretary of State Alex Padilla, who has been pushing to have California join the five other states that send ballots to every voter for every election.
His Voter’s Choice Act, which passed in 2016, was modeled on Colorado’s system of sending ballots to every voter. That state has replaced polling places with ballot drop boxes and a much smaller number of allpurpose voting centers open for days before the election.
Padilla had expected that almost all of California would move to the new system by 2020, but only 15 of the state’s 58 counties, including Napa, San Mateo and Santa Clara in the Bay Area, have signed on.
This election, which forced the entire state to test drive an allmail system, could change the attitudes of officials in many of those skeptical counties, Padilla said.
The Voter’s Choice Act “has long been my vision for the future of California elections,” he said in a statement. “I believe that the success of this election has convinced many more voters, election administrators and policy makers of the wisdom of this model.”
Padilla could get a boost from the Legislature. Assemblymember Marc Berman, DPalo Alto, said Monday that he will introduce a bill to require that mail ballots go out to voters in every state election.
At a news conference Monday, Gov. Gavin Newsom said he was willing to work with legislators, adding that “I certainly am open to pursuing it.”
Even without Padilla’s plan, mail voting has become the method of choice for most Californians. In the March primary, 72% of the votes came by mail and threequarters of newly registered voters opted to receive their ballots in the mail.
In Alameda County, 83% of registered voters are listed as permanently voting by mail, compared with about 50% a decade ago, said Tim Dupuis, the county registrar.
This year, Alameda County collapsed the 815 polling places it had in the 2018 general election into 100 voting centers, which still were lonely places on election day. Although the centers were open for four days, only about 46,000 people cast ballots in person, while 726,000 voted by mail, Dupuis said.
“We had about an 80% turnout, compared to 78% for ( former President Barack) Obama’s first term” in 2008, he said. “In a pandemic, that’s amazing.”
But Alameda County officials still haven’t signed on to allmail voting. There are concerns that eliminating neighborhood polling places will have an outsize effect in the county’s underserved communities, where people have always found it easy to walk to a place to vote.
“We chose not to be an early adopter,” Dupuis said. “The supervisors wanted to see how other counties handled ( allmail voting) and whether it made it harder for some people to vote.”
That could change now that the county has some experience with the new system.
“This was an opportunity to evaluate it, and I’m sure the ( county supervisors) will ask me how it went,” Dupuis said. “The voters are moving in that direction.”
There are other problems with the rules that come along with allmail voting. For 10 days before the election, counties have to open one voting center for every 50,000 registered voters, and one for every 10,000 voters the weekend leading up to the election.
For Alameda County, that would mean 20 earlyvoting centers and 100 for the final few days. In Contra Costa County, it would be 14 early centers and 70 on the last weekend, and in San Francisco, 10 and 50.
Counties would have to find temporary spots to set up for those voting centers and then pay election workers for the entire time, instead of just for election day.
“Trying to capture space for 11 days in San Francisco is virtually impossible,” said Arntz, the city elections director.
Adding to the problem is that only a handful of voters show up at the earlyvoting centers.
“Very, very few people use the voting centers 11 days out,” said Paul Mitchell, vice president of the nonpartisan Political Data Inc., which collects voter and election information. “For this election, counties were only required to open vote centers for four days, and that made a difference.”
The modified version used in this election, eliminating the longterm voting centers, could be something the Legislature will consider before 2022, Mitchell added.
While the state’s first experience with an allmail election came out of necessity, its effects aren’t going away.
“The hardest thing about changing voting patterns is convincing people to break their habits,” Mitchell said. “Maybe some people were forced to use vote by mail for the first time this year and found they liked it.”
Many California voters have fond memories of strolling with their families to a local polling place on election day, chatting there with friends and neighbors and then casting their ballot before walking back home.
“People have a lot of affection for their local polling places and still want to vote that way,” Arntz said. “But 6% turnout there is a signal that things are changing.”