This is how 1,000 Sacramento County workers will count Sacramento’s primary ballots

They’ve already started counting, but the real pressure begins Tuesday night.

Around 1,000 workers have mobilized for more than a week to begin counting Tuesday’s primary election ballots. But as the polls close across the Capitol, these workers will shift into high gear amid the late wave of ballots.

Based out of the bustling county election office in south Sacramento, the corps of temporary workers is tasked with collecting, sorting and tabulating the hundreds of thousands of ballots expected to come in from across the county.

According to Janna Haynes, a spokeswoman for the county, more than 170,000 ballots had either been processed through the center or voted in person — to arrive at the center after 8 p.m. — by midday Tuesday. That number would have to double to meet the 42% turnout rate seen during the 2018 gubernatorial primary.

But Haynes said that this year there “seems to be a little bit of apathy.”

“I don’t know if it’s because we just have the recall, and people are like ‘another election already?’” Haynes said. “Gubernatorial primaries are always going to be your lowest turnout year over year over year. But I would like to see us at least match where we were in 2018.”

How the ballots are counted

Workers began the ballot tabulation process May 28, as the first mail-in ballots arrived at the election office. Throughout Election Day, the workers counted mail-in ballots, as well as those from the county’s ballot drop boxes.

When the clock strikes 8, the office will field deliveries of thousands of ballots from across the county.

When a ballot arrives — whether by mail, a drop box or an in-person vote — it first is unloaded in a warehouse attached to the election office. It is then manually opened and delivered to a team who check the ballot’s signature and arrange them in a pile to be processed.

The organized ballots are then delivered to a separate room, where they are fed into a machine that automatically sorts them based on precinct. The sorted ballots then go to a team of employees that manually checks each ballot for deficiencies, such as stains or rips, that could affect their tabulation.

Finally, the ballots are sent to a room in which workers feed them into tabulation machines, which record the results. The tabulation room is closed to all but the workers tasked with running the machines, monitored by camera and live-streamed for the duration of the ballot-counting process.

“It is a really interesting dance between man and machine, with a lot of machines involved and a lot of people involved,” Haynes said.

Who is counting your ballots?

Although the election office retains about 40 full-time employees, most of its staff are seasonal workers trained for specific roles within the election process. This group was made up of volunteers until the 2018 Voters’ Choice Act, when Sacramento County opened 11-day vote centers that left workers with more ballots to process at once.

Since then, Haynes said that seasonal employees typically make $17 to $20 an hour for their work.

Haynes said that the elections office employs a diverse staff, ranging from retirees to high school students, who step in on the weekend before Election Day.

“I think it’s just an interesting job for people,” Haynes said. “It’s something that they’ve never done before, and they seem to enjoy it. We have so many people that return, year after year after year.”

Although elections like Tuesday’s primary typically see lower turnout than presidential or recount elections, Haynes said the office employs the same number of people for every cycle.

That means with a low turnout — which could hold to the dayside percentage of around 20% — time could really fly, and make Tuesday night a smooth process.

“Internally, we do the same thing, every election, but when we feel the urgency from the media, feel the urgency from the voters, that really changes the whole vibe that we feel here,” Haynes said. “So this is very chill.”

This story was originally published June 7, 2022 at 4:42 PM.