San Rafael, CA – Ballot tabulation continued this week for the Marin County Elections Department staff. Registrar of Voters Lynda Roberts said Friday, November 6, that there were about 57,000 ballots left to tally since Tuesday’s final election night results were counted. The staff updated its election results webpage Friday, leaving approximately 20,000 ballots to go.
About 50 trained full-time and part-time staff members have been working overtime and weekends for the past two weeks and staff is planning to continue vote processing into this weekend as well. Most of the ballots still needing tabulation are provisional ballots, vote-by-mail ballots dropped off at polling places, vote-by-mail ballots returned in drop boxes just prior to and on Election Day, and vote-by-mail ballots delivered by the U.S. Postal Service postmarked on or before Election Day.
An additional 36,447 ballots from the November 3 General Election have been tallied since Wednesday morning, leaving about 20,000 left. Roberts said the voter turnout was 89% as of Friday, including ballots yet to be counted.
“So far we don’t have many ballots coming back through the mail, but this election has not been following our usual patterns of ballot return,” Roberts said. “Overall, our mission has not changed. Our No. 1 priority is accuracy. Our staff is processing the ballots as fast as possible without cutting any corners. Every eligible vote will be counted.”
The Elections Department will post updates to the online results every Wednesday and Friday by 5 p.m. until the count is officially completed. Elections staff has until December 3 to finish the task, but a final tally will be complete before then. A final voter turnout percentage will be released at that point, which is expected to grow because of the additional ballots that may be received as late as November 20.
The final Marin voter turnout in the 2016 presidential election was 89%; it was 87% in 2012 and a record 91% in 2008. “This year, we might match or exceed the record of 91% from 2008,” Roberts said.
Roberts started the official canvass this week, continuing the process of preparing and tallying all ballots received. The canvass also includes the process of reconciling ballots and performing the manual tally of 1% of all the precincts and batches of vote-by-mail ballots.
Signature verification is the most time-intensive step in processing vote-by-mail ballots and is required by law. Voters whose mailed ballot envelope has a missing or mismatched signature are given time to fix the problem with staff assistance.
The canvassing process is conducted weekdays 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. and is open to the public. For more information, call the Elections Department at 415-473-6456.
For more details about the election process, see past news releases on the County Newsroom. In addition to periodic updates to the results webpage, residents may follow the Elections Department on Facebook.