SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Come election season Theresa Riviera may get 140 calls a day at the Sacramento County election office.
“I feel like we help the people when the voter calls in and says 'hey how come I haven’t received my ballot?' So I get a chance to look and give them the comfort of [knowing] it’s been mailed out,” Theresa Riviera, a phone banker, said.
Riviera has worked as a phone banker doing the important work of keeping voters informed in English and Spanish for the last 4 election cycles.
“A lot of times when people don’t speak the language they don’t think they have a voice,” Riviera said.
Ballots started getting mailed to voters on Tuesday. Janna Haynes with Sacramento County Voter Registration said the first thing you should do when you get your ballot is read your voter information guide.
"Read your county voter information guide so that you can get all of the information about what’s on the ballot because there is a lot of things on the ballot this time around depending where you live,” Haynes said.
But, what happens after you vote and mail your ballot back?
“Once your ballot is mailed we get mail dropped off here every single day. We start processing it through our mail sorter which scans the bar code to let you know that your ballot has made it here. It checks your signature to check your eligibility and identity to vote that ballot and then we process it. We open it to separate it from the envelope to make it anonymous and then we tabulate it which we will start doing about 10 days before Election Day,” Haynes said.
Find out more information on Sacramento County elections HERE.
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