On Sunday evening, San Luis Obispo resident Gene Nelson dropped off his vote-by-mail ballot at the SLO County Government Building, but the state of the collection box filled him with mixed emotions.
The drop box was nearly overflowing with ballots, he said.
“It was definitely at the top,” Nelson said. “I had to carefully thread my ballot in. It was difficult to get it in because there were so many ballots.”
On one hand, it encouraged him to see how many people cared about the election, but on the other hand, the drop box aroused concern for the safety of his ballot as he cast his vote.
There were so many ballots in the drop box that he could have taken his ballot right back out, he said.
“That certainly causes me concern because a bad actor could be stealing ballots,” he said.
This was around 6:30 p.m. on Sunday, Nelson said. The box was not emptied until the next morning.
The county empties the box daily, except for Sunday, which is more often then they are required to, public information officer for the Clerk-Recorder’s Office Erin Clausen told The Tribune. Their office is required to empty the collection boxes every 48 to 72 hours, she said.
San Luis Obispo County Clerk-Recorder Elaina Cano told The Tribune the ballot box at the government center was emptied on Saturday and again early Monday morning when staff arrived and saw that it was full. It was replaced it with a larger collection box, Cano said.
“There is an entire chain of command process that takes place when removing the ballots from the ballot boxes, including documentation,” Cano said. “The ballots then get transported in dual custody into the election center, where they are processed by the election staff.”
Nelson signed up for Ballottrax to receive updates on when his ballot is received and counted, but Cano said that any mail-in ballots dropped-off after Saturday won’t be tabulated until after Election Day.
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How many ballots has the county received?
As of Monday morning, nearly 82,000 ballots had been cast in SLO County, according to a California Secretary of State report. That represents about 44% of all registered voters in the county, out of 184,510 total.
Of those ballots, 20,733 were collected from drop boxes, 7,907 were dropped off at an elections center, 52,830 were sent by mail and 259 were faxed.
“Anecdotally, we’ve had a very steady stream of voters both at the Elections counter and at the Government Center drop box all day,” Clausen said on Monday.
Retrieval teams of two elections officials from the Clerk-Recorder’s Office collect ballots from drop boxes around the county every day, including at the county elections center until 8 p.m. on Election Day.
Teams of two from the office also pick up mail-in ballots from the San Luis Obispo post office once daily at no set time and twice on Election Day.
“Our retrieval teams are out collecting from drop boxes around the county, and the post office pickup this morning brought in quite a bit,” Clausen said.
Mail-in ballots received after Saturday will be counted after all of the in-person poll votes on Election Day and likely won’t be included in the initial results on election night.
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