[Kern County] COMMUNITY VOICES: Final results take time; give us a chance to do it right

Blog note: This article refers to a 2015 Kern County grand jury report.

The Californian's editorial (“OUR VIEW: California shoots itself in its ‘election foot'," March 8) makes many good points about why it takes so long to count the votes in California. In Kern County, more than 70 percent of registered voters are vote-by-mail. Recent changes in the law now require us to notify any voters who neglect to sign their vote-by-mail envelope and give them an opportunity to correct it. Same day voter registration adds another complication to the process we go through to ensure that only eligible voters get to vote, but that all eligible votes are counted.

I do take issue with the questions raised over the retirements of four long-time employees in 2019. There is no mystery here. A grand jury report in 2015 identified the succession issue as the single biggest problem facing the Elections Division. We had four experienced employees, most with 25 years with the county, who were beginning to plan their retirements. The next most experienced employees had just one year of experience.

Prior to the grand jury report, my office put together a reorganization plan to recruit and retain more employees at the entry level, while also changing the management structure in order to retain one or more experienced employees through at least 2022. We were able to implement the entry-level portion of the plan, which has enabled us to hire and retain many very talented and dedicated employees through the 2016, 2018 and now 2020 election cycles. We were unable to implement the part of the reorganization that would have enabled us to keep any management employees.

I do think there has been a lack of appreciation over the years about just how much of a leader Kern has been with our experienced and knowledgeable election employees. In past years, we were able to get sample ballots out as early as possible, much earlier than many other counties or than is required by law. In 2015, due to the careful planning of our elections management employees, Kern was the first county in the state to get the newly certified, most up-to-date equipment. This year, while sample ballots were not sent out as early as in previous years, we still met the legally required timeframes, although there was an error in the sample ballot, which we made every effort to mitigate when we became aware of it. Election day was as uneventful as any I’ve seen in my seven years as registrar of voters, due to the careful preparation and poll worker recruitment and training performed by the elections staff.

I am not sure what the editorial meant by “delays in counting the primary election vote and its outcome.” The first results on election night were at 8:15 p.m., and after that we averaged every two hours, which is similar to past elections. We finished the count on election night at 2 a.m. In 2018 it was 1:30 a.m. I would also point out that Kern County chose to keep the traditional precinct voting this year because we were concerned with some of the very issues that plagued Los Angeles and other vote center counties.

 In 2018, one-third of the total votes were late arriving vote-by-mail and provisional ballots counted after election day. This year it is closer to 44 percent. The media’s interest in how often we update on election night and what the election night totals are seems a bit quaint and anachronistic. This is not 1988, when 95 percent of the ballots would have been cast at the polls, with just a few absentee ballots to be counted later. Back then, unless there was an extremely close contest, the election night results were the results. This year, with just over 50 percent of the votes counted on election night, identifying winners and losers seems a little like handing out the Super Bowl rings at halftime, and then being surprised if the results change in the second half.

 We still have tens of thousands of vote-by-mail ballots to signature-check, along with conditional and provisional ballots to review. The dedicated election workers are currently working 12-hour days, in many cases seven days a week, to process the remaining ballots within our legally mandated timeframes. So, let’s everyone calm down, and give us a chance to do our job.

Bakersfield.com

Mary Bedard, Kern County registrar of voters

March 12, 2020