As the chair of the Humboldt County Republican Central Committee, Susan Moxon may not be above partisan rhetoric. A day before voters nationwide headed to the polls for Election Day, she shared to the local chapter’s social media account a prayerful post: “Dear Lord, Please make it TOO BIG TO RIG. Amen.” Forty minutes later, she shared another: “It feels as if the whole nation is waiting on the results of a pregnancy test. We either get a healthy baby boy or the daughter of Satan.”
But reached by the Journal a little after 11 a.m. on Election Day, Moxon made clear that whatever fears she may hold about former President Donald Trump’s widespread and unfounded claims of fraud in the 2020 election, they don’t extend to Humboldt County.
“I feel very confident we have election integrity in Humboldt County,” Moxon said by phone from the local GOP headquarters.
That doesn’t, however, mean local Republicans weren’t on guard. Moxon said the local chapter had about two dozen trained observers visiting voting centers throughout the county on Election Day and the days leading up to it to keep eyes on the process and report any irregularities.
That same morning, Humboldt County Registrar of Voters Juan Pablo Cervantes told the Journal that he welcomes the effort.
“They do it out of civic pride, and it helps me do my job better,” Cervantes said, referring to Moxon as one of his “ride or dies” who always shows up for the office’s logic and accuracy testing of voting equipment and adding that the more eyes and ears out and about making sure things are going as they should, the better. “We’ve had no problems with observers.”
Cervantes’ Election Day got off to a bit of a rocky start with a report at 5:45 a.m. that someone had vandalized the Arcata Community Center’s in-person voting center. Brent Duncan, the center’s manager, said workers arrived to find an array of pro-Palestinian graffiti, including some that disparaged Vice President Kamala Harris as “Bombala.” Cervantes said Arcata city work crews jumped into action to get it all cleaned up before voters arrived but it was a bit of a headache, noting he’d been contacted by the FBI, which was looking into the matter.
But overall, Cervantes said things were going smoothly amid a turnout that had already eclipsed that of the presidential primary in March.
Cervantes explained that California law allows elections offices to process vote-by-mail ballots that arrive in advance of Election Day — opening them, verifying them, sorting them and scanning them, everything but hitting “tabulate” on the vote counting software, which has to wait until polls close. He said about 17,000 ballots had been processed as of that morning, which he said would comprise his office’s first election night report.
But Cervantes said his staff’s focus switched over the preceding weekend from processing vote-by-mail ballots to preparing for Election Day itself, readying equipment and materials to be sent to voting centers, while also readying the office’s lobby to become one. (By mid-morning on Election Day, a line of voters stretched to the door.)
With the Voter’s Choice Act, everyone registered in the state of California is now sent a vote-by-mail ballot several weeks prior to Election Day. They then had the option of filling it out and mailing it in time to be postmarked by Nov. 5 or depositing it into one of a host of drop boxes set up throughout the county. Those who like the ritual of voting in person could also choose to either cast a new ballot at one of the county’s 13 in-person voting centers or simply filling out their vote-by-mail ballot but bringing it to one of the centers to feed into an optical scanner, which Moxon described as kind of an “express” option that allows voters the experience of going to the polls with the convenience of filling out their ballot at home.
The result of all this effort to bring “more ways and more days to vote,” as the California elections mantra goes, is a more complex influx of ballots that wind up at the Elections Office.
Cervantes said all vote-by-mail ballots are processed the same way, no matter whether they arrive in the post or through a drop box. They’re put through a machine that captures a photo of the envelopes’ signature lines and bar codes before sorting them by supervisorial district. (Cervantes said his predecessor, Kelly Sanders, purchased the machine with grant funds in 2019 before the COVID-19 pushed most of the electorate to vote by mail, saying, “she must have been seeing into the future,” because the automated process saves countless staff hours.)
Each signature is then checked at least twice against signatures the office has on file by separate elections workers before a ballot is verified and cleared for counting. Ballots that come in without signatures or with ones that don’t match what the elections office has one file are set aside but deemed curable, meaning elections staff will work to contact the voter to fix what needs fixing to verify the ballot, an effort Cervantes said is successful about half the time.
Ballots filled out and cast at the voting centers, or vote-by-mail ones brought in by voters and then physically put through the centers’ optical scanners, are logged in real time, with the results stored on memory cards in the ballot scanning machines. Once the polls close at 8 p.m. and the last voters in line have cast their ballots, those memory cards are physically brought back to the Humboldt County Elections Office, where they are inputted into a closed computer system — meaning it is not connected to the internet — and counted. Cervantes said he has a variety of transportation teams that go out to the county’s voting centers to retrieve these cards and the paper ballots cast, and bring them back to the Elections Office, noting that this year, members of the Humboldt County Board of Supervisors, the county administrative officer, the treasurer/tax collector and some sheriff’s office personnel have taken the oath to serve in this role, resulting in some budget savings.
“That’s six transport teams we don’t have to pay for,” Cervantes said. “To get that level of support from my peers is excellent.”
So while the first election night results will comprise vote-by-mail ballots received well in advance of Election Day, subsequent election night reports will include all ballots cast at the voting centers. Still, Cervantes said the sun would rise Nov. 6 with lots of ballots still to be counted and lots of work still to do.
There will be thousands of vote-by-mail ballots dropped off at the voting centers or drop boxes that still need to be processed, verified and counted, as well as those mailed before Election Day that show up within the following week. (Ballots must be postmarked on or before Nov. 5 and arrive by Nov. 12 to be counted.) And there will also be an unknown number of provisional ballots cast on Election Day by voters who registered when they voted, meaning their registration application needs to be processed and approved before their ballot counted, or voted provisionally due to an irregularity, though it’s expected that will happen less frequently now that voters are no longer assigned a specific voting center and can instead cast a ballot wherever they like.
Of course, that voter flexibility brings other challenges. With more than three dozen ballot types throughout the county based on voter addresses (and all voters getting a ballot sent to their home), Cervantes said it doesn’t make sense to stock every voting center with every ballot type in the county. So instead, beginning in the primary, the Elections Office sends ballot stock to every voting center and ballots are printed on demand by staff. At the Arcata Community Center, Duncan pointed out it’s a more time consuming process that can lead to some delays — noting the need to unseal and reseal bins, and fill out forms for every batch of ballot stock fed into the printer — as a line of some two dozen waiting voters stretched out the doors.
In the days and weeks after Election Day, Cervantes said he and his staff also have to perform a variety of reconciliations and oversight functions, including auditing all materials that come back from voting centers to make sure all ballots are accounted for and vote tallies match the number of ballots received. The office also conducts a manual recount of 1 percent of ballots cast by mail and of those cast at least one in-person voting center, making sure the manual counts align with the automated totals.
Additionally, in the days following Nov. 5, Cervantes said volunteers with the Humboldt County Elections Transparency Project will begin passing every ballot cast in the election through another optical scanner, capturing images that can be made available upon request to the public, along with open-source counting software, to conduct free recounts as people see fit.
All this is done prior to the election’s certification by the board of supervisors, Cervantes said, noting that making sure the transparency project’s results align with his office’s official counts allows him to sleep well with the results being certified.
Cervantes said it’s a huge undertaking, one that sees his office’s staff swell from the usual eight to more than 150 members. (Another recent change, he said, is that all voting center workers are now paid, which allows a more diverse cross section of the community to serve on Election Day.)
And the goal of the whole endeavor, Cervantes said, is to make it as easy as possible for Humboldt County residents to participate in the democratic process, and to ensure their votes are accurately counted when they do.
Reached Nov. 4, Humboldt County Democratic Central Committee Chair Mario Fernandez said he has faith in the local process, saying the local arm of the Democratic party didn’t have any plans to mobilize poll watchers or observers.
“We don’t feel compelled to for any reason,” he said. “There haven’t been any concerns brought to light.”
Back at the Arcata Community Center, Brendan LaMarr, 40, waited in line for about 20 minutes to cast a ballot for the first time in his life. He voted provisionally, saying he wasn’t registered and hadn’t decided to vote until the night before. LaMarr said voting never seemed important to him, saying he doesn’t own a television or read much news. But he said the combination of the national political discord he’s felt in recent years and the desire to set a good example for his young daughter inspired him to come out.
He said voting felt good.
“I feel part of something,” he said as voters filed into the community center behind him and birds chirped nearby in the crisp morning air. “Even though it’s quiet, it feels powerful.”
Thadeus Greenson (he/him) is the Journal’s news editor. Reach him at (707) 442-1400, extension 321, or thad@northcoastjournal.com.
This article appears in ‘Powerful’.
