Over 1.8 million vote-by-mail ballots ship out across Orange County Monday

Almost two million mail-in ballots loaded onto U.S. Postal Service trucks this weekend will reach local voters on Monday, and the Orange County Registrar of Voters, Bob Page, is confident he and 1,900 election season workers are ready to conduct an accurate and fair count.

According to data from the Registrar’s office, more than 1.8 million registered voters in Orange County are being asked to decide the race for the offices of president and vice-president as well as 170 other contests. Ten statewide initiatives and 30 local initiatives are also on this year’s ballot.

The county will open 123 ballot boxes across the region Monday where voters can drop off their ballots through Nov. 5. Their specific locations can be found on the Registrar’s website, ocvote.gov. Select locations will open for in-person voting beginning Oct. 26, and the remainder are expected to go live by Nov. 2. They’ll stay open until 8 p.m. on Election Day.

Election staff are constantly checking their rosters against data from the Postal Service, Secretary of State, Department of Corrections, the Orange County Health Care Agency and other government sources, Page said during an online seminar Wednesday. His staff also use information from credit agencies and other third-party sources to help verify the identities and residences of voters.

“This is something we are working on daily,” Page said. “We actually average about 60,000 updates to voter registration records every month.”

Only 1.59% of the vote-by-mail ballots sent out by the Registrar ahead of the primary election in March were returned by post offices as undeliverable, Page said. In comparison, 4.23% of all first-class mail sent in the U.S. in 2023 was marked as such.

Concerned residents are welcome to keep an eye on officials as they tally votes at the Registrar’s office, located at 1300 Grand Ave. in Santa Ana. The room where staff conduct the count has large windows allowing people in an adjacent observation area to watch what they’re doing. And the screens election officials look at as they verify signatures are mirrored to large monitors visible to members of the public.

The Registrar of Voters occasionally receives complaints of ballots allegedly sent to incorrect, duplicate, ineligible or even fictional persons and does investigate those claims, Page said. But to date, no significant allegations of fraud have been substantiated.

“What we find is we’ll randomly select some names and find we’ve already made the update to the record,” Page said.

Ballot drop boxes will be available around Orange County for the Nov. 5 general election.

(File Photo)

About 85% of ballots processed by the Registrar’s office are received by mail. Those must by postmarked by Nov. 5.

A growing number of ballots wind up getting delivered to the Registrar’s office after election night, Page said. During the most recent primary, 333,068 were received before polls closed, and 251,265 came in afterward.

The Registrar’s office encourages early voting because it facilitates a faster tally. However, he said every voter has the right to wait all the way up to election day to weigh their options.

“We can’t take that away from them, obviously, and we don’t want to,” Page said. “We do encourage early voting, but we know that a lot of voters still want to use that full period to continue to think about and monitor the news as they cast a ballot.”

Seeing that trend, Orange County officials invested $4.1 million after the 2022 midterm election to boost the Registrar’s capacity to process mail-in ballots. That allowed Page’s office to essentially double the equipment necessary to both send and receive them.

Page said he immediately saw improvement in the efficiency of vote counting as a result. As many as 91% of ballots cast in Orange County were included in the first round of preliminary results announced after the 2024 primaries, compared to 85% following the 2022 midterms.

On election night, counts from voting stations will be monitored and updated electronically in real time. An Orange County Sheriff’s Department sergeant will also be stationed at the command center coordinating the count so authorities can be quickly dispatched to any sort of disruption at the polls.

“We also work with the district attorney’s office,” Page said. “They have investigators out in the field when our vote centers are open [in case] we get a complaint about electioneering or intimidation, something they can address a little more easily than a police officer can. We had a few [such] calls in the primary.”

While observers are allowed to monitor activities at voting centers and challenge other people’s eligibility vote, election officials are not instructed by law to check for identification.

Someone questioning another’s right to vote must “provide evidence,” Page said. “They can’t just say ‘that person’s not eligible.’ And then the under state law that we have to follow, the fix to that challenge is to ask the voter: ‘Are you eligible?’”

“My job as the election administrator is to make sure we’re prepared no matter what the turnout is so that if we had 100% turnout, that we have the staff and the facilities and we have the equipment to be able to handle those voters,” Page said, adding that it’s typical for a presidential election to draw the highest voter turnout in a cycle.