STOCKTON, Calif. — Friday will mark three days since polls closed for California's Primary Election, but the work for the San Joaquin County Registrar of Voters' Office has not slowed down after a printing error led to significant delays in counting, officials said.
As of Thursday, 20,000 ballots had been processed in San Joaquin County, but 88,000 more, all vote-by-mail ballots, are still unprocessed.
The delay stems from a printing error that led to barcodes on some ballots being blurry, according to Interim Registrar of Voters Olivia Hale. Hale's most recent update estimates that 25% to 30% of vote-by-mail ballots were impacted by the printing error.
"It was Memorial Day weekend on Friday night. I got a phone call, (and) they were just beginning the process," Hale said. "We were getting a more than normal issue where (the scanning machine) was only accepting a smaller portion than it normally would."
The next day, Hale says she came into the Registrar of Voters Office and met with the county's printing and voting system vendors who analyzed the issue.
Several days later, Registrar of Voters staff members realized that blurry barcodes on some vote-by-mail ballots were causing the ballots to not be scanned.
"That's when we got a memo out to our Board of Supervisors, letting them know exactly what was going on and how we were going to have a solution," Hale said. "We wanted to report what was going on, but we wanted to make sure we also had a solution to share with the public at the same time."
The solution was treating the errored ballots as damaged ballots. Through the damaged ballots process, duplicate ballots are printed and filled out by two Registrar of Voters workers who mark the new ballot in the same way that the original ballot was marked by the voter.
"Our print vendors are currently shipping ballots daily to us to keep up with our process," Hale said. "The process that usually would have taken just a couple of days now becomes more of a process because you have to take out the ballots that didn't scan so that you can then put them through the duplication process."
Hale says her office has added staffing to keep up with the thousands of ballots to be counted or duplicated. She adds that despite the challenges, the county is still on track to certify results by July 7.
According to Hale, this election cycle is personal for her and her staff members. As workers process ballots, they are also processing grief after the county's Registrar of Voters, Heather Ditty died three days ahead of the June 7 primary.
"Heather was a loved boss. She really set a positive tone in our office, and she was the type of boss that sat down at the lunchroom table with all of the line staff just to be personable with them," Hale said. "It was a big blow for our office to lose her."
Losing their leader so close to Election Day and dealing with a simultaneous challenge of blurry barcodes on ballots, Hale says staff members felt united.
"We agreed together that we were going to knock it out of the park in her honor," Hale said. "And that's exactly what we're doing."
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