850 polling places might be trimmed to 125 voting centers
SAN JOSE >> Starting in March next year, Santa Clara County residents may be able to cast their ballots at any of 125 designated voting centers in the county and do so up to 10 days before an election.
If the Board of Supervisors approves the dramatic change in April, Santa Clara would join a small but growing number of counties in California that allow residents to vote anywhere within their boundaries instead of the traditional polling stations nearest their homes. The aim is to make it easier for busy people on the go to do their civic duty.
San Mateo County made the switch last year, as did Madera, Napa, Nevada and Sacramento counties. In addition, Fresno, Orange, Los Angeles and Mariposa counties will switch to the new system in 2020.
In Santa Clara County, 850 polling stations would be consolidated
into 125 voting centers — one for every 10,000 voters.
At any of these centers, residents would be able to register on the spot, pick up replacement ballots, vote in person or drop off ballots. Under the new system, all voters automatically would receive a vote-by-mail ballot, even if they haven't requested one.
The Board of Supervisors is scheduled to decide next month whether to implement the change, which is optional under a state law called the Voter's Choice Act. The change is estimated to cost an additional $10.4 million a year, according to Registrar of Voters spokesman Eric Kurhi.
The voting centers would each be equipped with an electronic poll book that allows workers to see whether a person has voted at any location across the county or submitted a vote-by-mail ballot. People who need a replacement ballot, or a ballot in another language, can have one printed for them on the spot.
Up to 25 of the regional centers would open 10 days before the election, while the remaining 100 centers would open three days before.
The transition would cost at least $2 million in onetime expenses, plus $6 million to pay poll workers, $2 million to rent facilities hosting the voting centers and $2.4 million to pay for postage and printing.
Labor and rent currently cost $1 million per election, Kurhi said.
“It's just a different animal when hiring staff for multiple days versus working one day at the polls,” Registrar Shannon Bushey told the Board of Supervisors at a March 12 meeting. “There's more training, more duties they perform, so we'll be training them for longer.”
The county already expected to spend $16 million to $24 million to buy new voting machines, but if the new model is approved, it could cut about $4 million from the costs because fewer machines would be needed. It also expects to receive $5.5 million in new state funding for voting system modernization.
The registrar says the new system should make it faster to count ballots because about 90 percent fewer provisional ballots should be cast. Such ballots currently are used when voters show up to different polls than the ones assigned or if they lost their vote-bymail ballot.
In the last election, the registrar received 35,000 provisional ballots countywide. They are typically the last and most time-consuming ballots to be counted and can take two weeks to process, Kurhi said.
The plan is still preliminary, and it's unclear where the new voting centers would be located or how far most voters would have to travel to get to a center. The registrar says focus groups held in 2017 showed 71 percent of participants would more likely go to a vote center near their work or school than home.
In determining the location of the voting centers, the county would consider factors such as proximity to public transit routes, hightraffic areas, and neighborhoods with high numbers of people with disabilities, limited English proficiency, low household incomes and without a car, Kurhi said.
Most of the county's outlying rural areas are already mail-only precincts, but those residents would be able to use any of the new voting centers as well, he said.
It's also unclear how the new system might affect turnout.
The registrar plans to ask for $2 million from the 2020 budget to conduct advertising and outreach about the changes, including where the voting centers should be located.
All five counties that implemented the new model in November 2018 saw turnout increase by 12 to 19 percent, according to a survey conducted by the Santa Clara Registrar's staff, although several counties statewide saw a spike in turnout.
According to the staff survey, turnout among the five counties was lower than expected during early days of voting center operations, but higher than expected closer to Election Day, resulting in high wait times in some counties.
Wait times in San Mateo County averaged 20 minutes, with a maximum one-hour wait, while Sacramento County reported two hours at a university campus voting center as its longest wait, in part because of record-high, last-minute voter registrations, according to the staff survey.
If supervisors adopt the change this spring, voters would see the changes in the March 2020 primary election.