Six years after California expanded ballot access, many counties are reluctant to adapt
Six years ago, California sought to make voting earlier and more accessible for its electorate.
Under the Voter’s Choice Act (VCA) signed by then-Gov. Jerry Brown, all registered voters in participating counties would receive a mail-in ballot. Precinct polling places would give way to centralized voting centers, where ballots could be cast up to 10 days before Election Day. Drop-off locations would be available 29 days out.
The VCA “will empower California voters with a major expansion of early voting,” predicted then-Secretary of State Alex Padilla, who was elected to the U.S. Senate last month. “Why limit voting to one location on a single Tuesday?”
When Brown signed the bill, just 5 counties adopted the new voting model. But in 2022, despite data from the Secretary of State showing that the VCA has substantially improved turnout, fewer than half of California’s counties — 27 of 58 — have signed on.
Local election officials offer several reasons for the VCA’s middling reception. Voting habits can be deeply ingrained, and many voters remain committed to showing up at the polls. Some rural counties have resisted the shuttering of traditional precinct polling places because residents would have longer drives to vote in person.
Moreover, research in 2020 found that the consolidation of in-person polling locations in many California counties led to losses in Black and Latino turnout as a share of the electorate. The state’s Black voters are more likely than the general electorate to prefer voting in-person, another study shows.
In a statement, a Department of State spokesperson said it expects “another five to six counties” may transition to VCA in 2023 and a handful in 2024.
“Since some counties need county board approval prior to making the announcement, we don’t yet have a confirmed list of which counties will transition until that step happens,” the spokesperson said.
Support for VCA in some rural counties, not others
For El Dorado County Clerk Bill O’Neill, moving to the VCA model in 2020 was a no-brainer. The elections office receives a majority of ballots by mail, meaning that staffing those 128 polling places didn’t add up. A 13-person committee unanimously agreed that dropping the precinct model was the right call.
Before the switch, there were 128 polling locations in El Dorado County. Now, per the VCA, there must be one at least one voting center per 50,000 registered voters, meaning at least two in a county with over 137,000 active voters.
“It’s a huge level of effort,” O’Neill said. “To do that when we were primarily vote-by-mail didn’t make sense. It made sense that we transition our processes, procedures, and equipment over to a vote center model which services the vote-by-mail population as well as in-person.”
El Dorado opened three voting centers 11 days before Election Day — one in El Dorado Hills, one in Placerville, and one in South Lake Tahoe. Four days before the election, the county opened 10 more in smaller towns around the county.
“I think the greatest success is being able to serve voters at a vote center almost identical to how we can serve them at our office,” O’Neill said.
But other counties with a similar rural demographic, including neighboring Placer, are less enthusiastic because of the distances involved in reaching the voting centers.
Placer drew widespread criticism when it took longer than almost every other California county to process ballots after November 8. Election officials defended their process as one that’s simply very thorough, and while they are open to switching to the VCA model, they won’t push for major changes their electorate doesn’t want to make. There are nearly 280,000 active voters in Placer and on Election Day last month, the county had to staff 164 precincts.
Placer election officials say they’re open to the VCA model but won’t force it.
“We feel that the juice is worth the squeeze, and until voters tell us differently, that’s the process we’re going to follow,” said Stacy Robinson, Placer County Public Information Assistant.
Why Sacramento County made the switch
West of El Dorado in Sacramento County, where the VCA was adopted in 2018, the larger population took a year to make the switch from precincts to voting centers.
“It was an uphill battle to educate people on the changes because they were significant,” said Janna Haynes, Public Information Officer for Sacramento County. Not having their usual precinct polling place was confusing for many of the county’s 864,000 voters. Those not registered as absentee voters were puzzled when they received a mail-in ballots.
“There were a lot of questions, and that’s a battle we’re still facing,” she said.
The county decided to make the switch after equipment failures on Election Night 2016. Given the expense of new machines and the task of finding workers for 550 polling locations in a county where 67% of voters use mail ballots, it made sense.
“It was almost like we were running two separate elections — an absentee ballot and then on Election Day, 550 locations for people that wanted to vote in-person,” Haynes said.
The VCA helped consolidate all of those voters into one system that benefited everyone.
The “biggest wins” in Sacramento under the VCA model are voters’ ability to drop their mail-in ballots off anywhere 29 days before the election, and, for the small percentage of voters who still choose to do so in-person, the 10 days to cast their ballot in advance.
Voting early is a win all around; it’s not just potentially more convenient for the voter, but it also speeds up the ballot counting process at the County Clerk’s office after the election. Sacramento, like Placer, was one of the slowest in the state to get all of its ballots counted. Haynes attributes this to receiving tens of thousands of mail-in ballots — which take longer to process and verify than in-person ballots — on and after Election Day.
More NorCal counties adopt the model
Sonoma and Yolo counties are northern California’s newest additions to the VCA model. Both signed on in 2022 after transitioning from “VCA-like” models in previous elections.
In Yolo County, VCA-like meant that voting centers weren’t open for the full 10 days before Election Day — only four, said County Clerk Jesse Salinas, who says he saw a bump in turnout compared with the rest of the state after making the transition.
“Since we have implemented the VCA-like model ... we were 4-5% higher than the statewide voter turnout average, which was a big jump,” he said.
The June primary and November general election were the county’s first true test of the full VCA model, and Salinas was thrilled to report that on Yolo’s turnout for the November 8 election last month was about 7% higher than the state’s average, which he credits to the 10 days of voting early and the convenience of the mail-in ballot.
“It all makes it easier for folks,” he said.
In both Yolo and Sonoma counties, staffing hundreds of polling precinct centers was getting more and more difficult.
Sonoma County Registrar Deva Marie Proto started implementing VCA-like elections in 2020 when she knew the county would not be able to find all the poll workers it would need — and when she was trying to plan her election around the potential for a natural disaster.
“We’ve had a number of fires and luckily, they haven’t coincided very closely with elections, but with November being in fire season, we were really concerned about how people would vote if there was an area of the county that was evacuated,” she said.
Sonoma County incorporates the city of Santa Rosa, which in 2017 was pummeled by the Tubbs Fire that killed 24 people, destroyed more than 5,000 homes, and forced 100,000 to evacuate. Before the Camp Fire started in Paradise the following year, it was the most destructive wildfire in California history.
“With the VCA model, voters could go anywhere in Sonoma County and cast their ballots, and that was one of the biggest reasons for us.”
Like every other county making the transition, Yolo and Sonoma have their share of rural voters concerned about losing their polling centers. But, also like the other counties, the benefits far outweigh the disadvantages.
Most elections officials agree that educating voters on their options — now that they have so many — is the most important thing.
“We need to continue to work on getting the word out,” Salinas said. Outreach funding from the Secretary of State is crucial for all of the counties making the transitions, especially in counties with such diverse populations where materials in different languages are necessary.
The Secretary of State provides funding for outreach materials when counties join the VCA, but grants and county budgets have to cover other election-related expenses.
“We do social media, we do press releases, we hold community gatherings to try to get input ... I think everyone can see that the model is working really well,” Salinas said.
This story was originally published December 7, 2022 at 6:00 AM.
