A week after election, 81,000 unprocessed ballots remain in Sonoma County

The counting process has been delayed by an outdated ballot-counting system and a large number of late mail-in and provisional ballots.|

Nearly 81,000 ballots received late by the Sonoma County elections office have yet to be counted as of Thursday afternoon. That’s nearly 40 percent of all votes cast during the Nov. 6 election.

Deva Proto, the incoming county elections chief, said it’s unclear when the unprocessed ballots remaining from last week’s election will be tallied to produce the final results. Under state law, county officials have 30 days after Election Day to certify all votes.

The sheer number of unprocessed ballots, including ?71,554 mail ballots received between Nov. 5 and Nov. 9, could affect a number of close contests, including the tight race in for the District 4 seat on the Santa Rosa City Council.

The top vote-getter last Tuesday, Victoria Fleming, led with 43.5 percent of the vote to 41.1 percent for the nearest of her two rivals, Dorothy Beattie, who trails by just 169 votes. The third candidate, Mary Watts, earned 15.3 percent of the vote. Altogether, the 6,891 votes have been tallied in the race.

But 3,933 mail ballots remain uncounted, according to a Press Democrat analysis based election data provided by the county.

It’s enough of a ballot pool for Beattie to think she has a chance to close the gap.

“I remain cautiously pessimistic,” she said.

“If 36 percent of the vote has not been counted,” she said, citing her own figure, “we have no idea” who has won the seat.

In Petaluma, where voters were deciding on candidates for three at-large council seats, 9,447 unprocessed mail ballots remain to be tallied, according to the county.

Results from last Tuesday put candidate D’Lynda Fischer in the third -place slot with 6,176 votes, just 97 more than Dennis Pocekay.

Fischer said that with seven candidates in the field race, some of them separated by only a few percentage points, there’s no way to know how the vote will ultimately turn out.

“Every vote matters and every vote needs to be counted,” Fischer said. “I don’t’ think we should be saying anything definitive until the (county) has ratified the election.”

Proto said the process of counting votes in Sonoma County is complicated by a number of factors, including an outdated computer system used in the tallying and the high number of people who cast votes through mail and provisional ballots.

About 75 Up to 80 percent of Sonoma County’s registered voters vote by mail.

In addition to the outstanding mail ballots, an estimated 8,226 provisional ballots were cast countywide last week, an unprecedented number, according to the county. Provisional ballots are cast by registered voters whose names were not on the official voter registration list at the polling place where they voted.

In this election, some of those voters may have been fire victims from Santa Rosa.

“The reason we might have some provisionals is because we had 1,576 homes lost in Fountaingrove, and all those people in Journey’s End,” Beattie said. “Those two groups may have had to sort out where they were registered and had to vote.”

Verifying provisional ballots is time consuming and requires verifying signatures, eligibility to vote, confirming that the voter has not already voted and cross-checking local races they are allowed to vote on. Officials have only begun that process this week.

“We can do it quickly or we can do it correctly and accurately,” Proto said. “After Election Day, there are a lot of mandated duties for reconciling and processing ballots. It’s not just counting.”

On top of the unprocessed mail and provisional ballots, 554 conditional ballots were cast by Sonoma County residents who registered to vote on Election Day. And 380 unprocessed ballots were categorized as “other,” which includes ballots that are damaged and must be remade, bringing the total sum to about 81,000.

Proto said some small share of the mail ballots in that sum may have been counted on Election Day.

In some cases, provisional ballots were cast by Sonoma County residents who were in other counties in the state. Proto said her office is still receiving local voters’ provisional ballots from other counties.

”I think everyone in the state saw more provisionals than ever before this year,” she said.

Proto, who officially takes office in January, said the county’s computer system to count votes will be replaced with a new one that allows votes to be tallied and the results updated periodically. The system now in place does not allow for running updates.

That means that all late ballots - mail-in, provisional and conditional - must be verified, sorted and processed before their votes can be tallied and added to Election Day totals.

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