The June 2 Primary Election is just a few months away, and the San Luis Obispo County Elections Office is planning a few changes.
In San Luis Obispo County, more than 90% of voters have voted by mail every year since 2020, according to the Elections Office.
Anthony Balacios said he prefers to vote by mail so he can research the policies and politicians on the ballot.
“If I do the mail-in, then I don't feel pressured to not look at somebody's record, regardless of if they're one party or the other,” Balacios said. “I just care about themselves as people and what they do for our area and our county and even our state.”
With such a large number of votes by mail, the SLO County Elections Office is adding new technology to its ballot counting process.
Processing vote-by-mail ballots
One device is the Agilis Election Mail Sorting and Processing System. This machine quickly sends mail-in ballots past a camera, which scans the ballots for voter signatures, then separates them into groups of 200. If any mail-in ballot envelopes have an abnormality, like a missing signature, that envelope will be separated from the group so poll workers can double-check it.
Once those signatures are verified, the ballots are sent through the machine again to be opened. After that, the ballots are taken to the standard ballot-counting machines that have been used by the office in previous elections.
County Clerk-Recorder Elaina Cano said the Agilis machine helps streamline the first step in the ballot-counting process.
The $500,000 machine was paid for through grant funding. Cano said it was purchased after their vendors stopped supporting their current equipment.
“This is going to be a huge benefit to being able to process those envelopes and ballots a lot quicker so that we can count them and get the results out to the voters a lot faster," Cano said.
Cano said it will do all of the processing five times faster than the office’s old equipment. She said speed is crucial this year after a change in the law requires elections offices to count all of the vote-by-mail ballots 13 days after the election, cutting their deadline to count the ballots in half.
“It was really based off of everybody wanting the results coming in a lot faster and knowing that in the State of California, most of the people do return their voted ballots by mail," Cano said.
Voting equipment at the polls
San Luis Obispo County polling places are switching to digital pollbooks for the first time during the next election. These e-pollbooks will replace the paper rosters that voters are expected to sign before they vote at each polling location.
"We're one of the few counties left that don't use [e-pollbooks], certainly a county our size," Cano said. "Most counties have already made that transition."
Cano said this transition will help save close to $100,000 in printing costs for paper rosters. With the e-pollbooks, poll workers will have real-time access to voter registration information and confirm that a voter is registered and is voting at their assigned polling location.
“The process will still remain the same," Cano said. "They'll be provided a ballot, they get to go into a voting booth and then deposit their voted ballot into the ballot box.”
Voters will also have the opportunity to put their vote by mail ballot into the regular ballot box without the envelope.
Balacios said he doesn’t mind the shift to newer technology.
“As long as everything's being checked out and we're all, you know, everything’s, everybody's accounted for… that’s all I care about," he said.
