There are small teams of three sat around tables studiously reading from a list in this room at the Ventura County Government Center.
Even though it seems like the election is long over, for these workers, it isn’t. They are performing a meticulous hand count of ballots from randomly selected batches of ballots, from election night earlier this month.
"It's called the 1% manual tally," explains Michelle Ascencion, Ventura County Clerk-Recorder and Registrar of Voters.
"We take the random 1% selection of vote by mail ballots and the in-person ballots and go through each contest front and back of each of the ballots and hand mark them on their packet of contests."
This manual tally audit is a mandated process and has to occur during a 30-day period from the election.
"It's a post-election night audit. It's a second verification of the operation of the tabulators, just making sure that they're still working. We test every single one of them before the election. Then looking at it as they're tabulating, and then after election night, a second verification just to make sure that they're still working properly," said Ascencion.
It’s a laborious process but essential for maintaining the integrity of the election, explains Ascencion.
"I feel like our process is very thorough. You know, everyone wants a secure election, Well, this is part of it. You know, security is neither fast nor cheap. And so if you want to have a thorough, secure election, these are the steps that we need to go through and not take any shortcuts, but go completely A through Z and make sure that we are doing everything we can to ensure a thorough and secure process," she said.
And there’s still work to do with verifying each and every vote – which takes time, especially with the high number of postal votes in the county this year.
"The reason why it takes so long is because more people than ever before are voting by mail. The vote by mail process takes longer than just the straight walk in on Election Day," Ascencion said.
"The reason why vote by mail takes longer is because with every envelope that comes in, we are signature checking to verify that that ballot is coming from the rightful voter. So it's not that we are trying to slow things down. It's just that with 90% of the ballots coming in as vote by mail and you have to do that signature verification step before the ballot can be counted. It's slow and tedious. We're going through extraordinary measures to make sure that we can count every legal vote," she said.
Measures that include reaching out to voters to give them an opportunity to "cure" a signature which doesn't match the voting record, and checking for duplicate ballots.
This painstaking process is open for the public to observe, as the repetitive and detailed work continues throughout the week.
