BY ALEXEI KOSEFF
The slow vote count has become a staple of California elections — and a national frustration — as the state has shifted to overwhelmingly voting by mail.
It’s the result of the additional time that California provides for mail ballots to arrive at local elections offices and the extra verification steps that workers complete before counting those votes. Because of the sheer size of the state, millions of ballots don’t get counted until weeks after election day.
But what if you want to make sure that yours is among the results rolling in on election night after the polls close? Perhaps you sleep more soundly knowing that you successfully exercised your right to vote, or maybe you want to help shape the early narratives of who’s up and who’s down.
Your best bet — easy, straightforward and cheap — is to mail back your ballot as soon as possible.
County elections offices sent a ballot to every registered California voter in early February, a month before the March 5 primary election. Those ballots now include prepaid postage, so you don’t even need a stamp. As long as it is postmarked by March 5, your ballot can arrive up to a week after the election and still be counted.
But if you return it sooner, so that workers receive it by the Friday or Saturday before the primary, your vote is likely to end up in the first batch of results released after the polls close at 8 p.m., according to Assemblymember Gail Pellerin, who served as the chief elections official of Santa Cruz County for nearly three decades before she was elected to the Legislature in 2022.
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“Pretty much any ballot we got by Saturday, we would be able to process and get it through all the checks and balances to get into the count on Tuesday night,” said Pellerin, a Santa Cruz Democrat.
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