Election day is three months away, but voting will start much earlier this year because of new state laws passed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. That includes one that requires county election officials to send mail-in ballots to all 20 million of the state's registered voters ahead of the election on Nov. 3, 2020.
Now false claims being made by President Donald Trump about the validity and security of voting by mail are placing more attention on an issue that has long been standard practice with little to no evidence of fraud in San Diego County.
San Diego County Registrar of Voters, Michael Vu, joined Midday Edition Tuesday to answer your question about voting security. His answers have been lightly edited for clarity.
Q: When can we expect to see our ballots arrive in the mail?
A: We are going to send out ballots on October 5th. So that's always 29 days in advance of the election where we start sending out the mail ballots. Over 1.8 million mail ballots will be in at the US Postal Service and then they'll start delivering from there.
Q: So when will early voting actually start? And what are our options for voting this year in San Diego?
A: Yeah, so with the whole pandemic, dramatic changes are occurring. And I think the least of all the dramatic changes is the fact that everyone is going to receive a mail ballot. And the reason why I say that is because 75% of the electorate has already signed up to receive a mail ballot because they've asked to be a permanent mail ballot voter. So we're really only extending it to the other 25% who generally go to a polling place, or that's the only option that is out there.
Where the dramatic changes for us, as well as the public, is the fact that the in-person locations is where most of the changes will occur as a result of the pandemic. Instead of having, for example, the 1,548 precincts that we had in March, what we plan on having are much larger locations running for multiple days, in fact, four days. So Oct. 31 through Nov. 3 at 8 p.m., which is Election Day at 235, what we call super poll sites.
Q: How soon can people send in their ballots, right away after they receive them?
A: Once they receive them, they can vote them and in fact, we encourage them to vote their ballot, seal it, to sign it and get it back to us as soon as possible. And they can do so through the US Postal Service. There will be 124 mail ballot drop off locations open starting Oct. 6, running all the way through 8 p.m. on Election Day. Or you can drop off your mail ballot at any one of our super poll sites on Election Day or on the three days leading up to Election Day at any one of those sites. But what I highly encourage voters to do is go through the US Postal Service to return your ballot or to one of our mail ballot drop off locations. Part of our campaign is 'Vote safer San Diego.' We're trying to lessen the amount of congregating of individuals on Election Day. We are asking voters not to wait to the last minute and to voter safer by voting your mail ballot.
Q: How will the anticipated delays in USPS mail delivery be handled to ensure that all votes are counted?
A: So the state has passed a law extending the time frame for us to accept a ballot to 17 days after Election Day so long as the ballot is postmarked by Election Day.
Q: How does the registrar make sure that ballots aren't sent to people who can no longer vote, for example, because they died?
Part of our program, which it goes back to a federal law called the National Voter Registration Act. A lot of individuals use the acronym, which is NVRA really are federal as well as state laws that dictate how we are to maintain our voter registration file. We clean our files and maintain our files strictly based off of those federal and state rules. So what we do is before we send out any ballots, what we're going to be sending is a county-wide mailer.
We run what is known as a national change of address against that to see who has potentially moved and then correspond with them. Individuals that have maybe passed away, we clean out our respective voter registration file. It's not necessarily a perfect system, though, because there is some lag time associated with it and it's not in real-time where all of this information is coming to us and they automatically fall off the rolls because we could potentially disenfranchise voters as well by not sending them a mail ballot. So we've got to be very careful with that. At the end of the day, though, every voter is given one ballot that they can vote on and return back to our office. We find a situation where a person we send out a mail ballot but then their status changes and so we have to suspend that ballot and reissue them a new one. Know that that second ballot has been suspended and we're tracking that ballot, all mail ballots.
Q: Assuming I get my ballot in prior to the election, is there any way to check the status of that ballot?
A: The answer to your question is yes. There will be a new service called 'Where's My Ballot' that you can subscribe to. There will be push notifications to you as soon as you subscribe. It's free of charge and it's currently on our website. SDvote.com. And it will push information as to the status of your mail ballot as it's getting delivered to you. And then once you vote it and send it back, you can get push notification as it's working its way back to our office as well as when we count the ballot.
Q: Now, I've seen some questions on social media about people worried about the signature. If we submit a mail-in ballot our ballot signature will be compared to the one on file. How can we update the signature on file if we're concerned that our current signatures may not match our original one?
A: The best answer to your question is, is by re-registering to vote. You can do so in a number of ways. The safer way considering there's a pandemic is to do so online. And what you will do is, is once you register to vote, it will pull your signature from the DMV and send that signature to us. Now, if you do not have a signature at the DMV, then it will prompt you to print it out, sign it and send it back to our office. We'll scan in that new registration form with your new signature. That's what we'll compare your mail ballot against.
Q: I know some people are concerned that their signature might not be recognized by somebody and their vote might get disqualified. Is that a worry?
A: Actually there's a couple of laws that protect a voter. So once we check a signature off of the mail ballot against that on file, if we find out that it does not match, we are actually legally obligated to notify the voter that they have the ability to secure their signature by signing an affidavit and getting it back to our office.
Q: Is a ballot counted as soon as it is received or is it held until all the ballots come in? And if it's held, how secure is it from fire or mischief?
A: So we have the ability once we send out the ballots and then we receive voter ballots back to be able to signature verify it. First of all. We check it and make sure that it's the person who has voted this mail ballot. And then what we have the ability to do is, is then extract and scan and tabulate that ballot after it's been received, once it's been verified. And we can start as soon as the mail ballots come back to our office. That's a change in the law because we would normally be able to signature verify, but we could not extract and scan in that ballot until the 14th day prior to an election. But now, with the change in the law, we can do as soon as we receive it.
Q: So what does that mean for election night? How many of the ballots that have already been received will have been counted?
A: Well, we're hoping to get as many mail ballots into the 8 p.m. release on election night, but that will really depend on voters. If they return it sooner or to our office, the better it's going to be because then we can signature verify it, extract it, scanned it into the system and then be able to report it at 8 p.m. But if it's too late for us to be able to get through those respective processes, then we most likely will have to wait until the post-Election Day process and election results updates for it to get counted.
Q: How conclusive do you expect the results to be on election night?
A: Well, with mail balloting being the predominant way that voters vote these days, it will depend on how many voting mail ballots have been returned to our office for us to be processed and then ultimately get into the count. These days, it really extends out much further than just Election Day. So we're hoping that many of them there are wide gaps. That's always an election official's prayer is that there are wide margins regardless of who's winning. But at the end of the day, as we know, that voters hang on to their mail ballots and don't return them until closer to Election Day. We're hoping that's not the case this election. But if it happens to be the case these close contests could go all the way up until we certify the election, which is 30 days after Election Day.
Q: Do you still need volunteers to work the polls?
A: Well, we are looking at that right now in terms of our poll worker force. As you can imagine, this pandemic has created issues across the entire spectrum. We're not immune to that from an election's point of view in terms of conducting elections. Really what we're doing right now is kind of assessing how we're really going to conduct the election. We won't have your traditional neighborhood polling places on Election Day, as voters have been accustomed to. Polling locations that we will have will be super consolidated. We'll have much larger facilities that we would need to operate from for social distancing purposes to keep everyone safe and healthy.
And as a result of that, we're having to change the dynamics of how we recruit poll workers as well as train poll workers. Before, in a traditional polling place world, we would need 9,000 volunteer poll workers. In this super consolidated world where we're thinking about 235 super sites, we're going to need around 3,500 individuals across four days. That's a big change for our normal poll workers. The other considerations that we have to take into account is, is that as opposed to working one day, it's going to be an eight-day affair, four days to work, potentially two days worth of training. Normally it's a two-hour onsite training and as well as the site set up one day and the breakdown the following day. So it's an eight-day minimum commitment.
Q: Any last words of advice?
A: We will be sending out a countywide mailer to all registered voters this week stating all the different changes that will be occurring with this upcoming election. I think the most important aspect with this upcoming election right now is everyone to check the status of their residence address, as well as their mailing address, which will be on this mailer of what we have on file for them. And if it's different, then these individuals would need to re-register to vote at SDVote.com. It only takes two minutes.
