Your Voting Questions Answered

Speaker 1: 00:00 Election day is now three months away, but voting will start earlier and already questions are swirling around how safe and secure voting will be. We've invited our San Diego County, registrar of voters, Michael VU, to join us to answer questions that you, our listeners have sent in. So, Michael, thank you very much for being here. Thank you for having me. So one of the questions that we got a very basic one here on Facebook is from Kathleen pallette, who asks, when can we expect to see our ballots arrive in them? Speaker 2: 00:29 Well, as she has asked, we are going to send out ballots on October 5th. So that's always 29 days in advance of the election where we start sending out the mail ballot. And so voters should expect October 5th, where all of the ballots, the 1.8 million over 1.8 million mail ballots will be in the, at the us postal service. And then they'll start delivering from there. Speaker 1: 00:53 So when will early voting actually start and what are our options for voting this year in San Diego? Speaker 2: 00:58 Yeah, so with the whole pandemic dramatic things are happening are dramatic, changes are occurring. And I think the least of all the dramatic changes is the fact that everyone's going to receive a mail ballot. And the reason why I say that is because 75% of the electric electorate is already signed up to receive a mail ballot because they've asked to be a permanent mail ballot voter. So we're really only extending it to the other 25% who generally go to a point place, or that's the only option that is out there. Where are the dramatic changes for us as well as the public is that the fact that the in person locations is where most of the changes will occur as a result of the pandemic. Instead of having, for example, the 1,548 precincts that we had in March, what we plan on having are much larger locations running for multiple days, in fact, four days. So October 31st through November 3rd at 8:00 PM, which is election day, uh, at 235, what we call super polls sites. Speaker 1: 02:01 So there will be opportunity to vote in person starting October 31st. Um, how soon can people send in their ballots right away after they receive them, Speaker 2: 02:10 Uh, like any other, uh, prior elections, uh, once they receive them, they can vote them. And in fact, we encourage them to about their ballot to seal it, to sign it and get it back to us as soon as possible. Uh, and they can do so through the us postal service. Uh, certainly we will have double the amount of mail ballot drop off locations, starting the, the following after the, we send out the mail ballots on October 5th, October 6th, we will have mail ballot drop off locations, 124 of them throughout the entire County, running all the way through APM on election day for a person to drop off their mail ballot. Or you can drop off your mail ballot at any one of our super poll sites, the 235, which we are in the process of solidifying, um, on election day or the three days leading up to election day at any one of those sites. Speaker 2: 02:56 Um, but what I highly encourage voters do is go through the U S postal service to return your ballot or to one of our mailbox drop off locations. Again, part of our campaign is vote, uh, both safer San Diego, um, and part of doing that is to get it through the us postal service. One of our mailbox drop off locations. Certainly you can drop it off here, um, or at one of our, uh, polling site, super poll sites. But again, we're trying to lessen the amount of congregating of individuals that would take that on election day. We are, um, trying to, uh, communicate to voters that again, don't wait til the last minute don't congregate in any extent, like what we're hearing from our public health officials to avoid doing that. And again, to vote safer by voting your mail ballot. Speaker 1: 03:42 So we have a question here from Margo Glasser. Speaker 2: 03:45 This is Margaret Glasser from San Diego. My question is how will the anticipated delays and USP S mail delivery be handled to ensure that all votes are counted? So the state has passed a law, extending the timeframe for us to accept about two 17 days after election day so long as the ballot is postmarked by election day. Speaker 1: 04:07 So how does the registrar make sure that ballots aren't sent to people who, who can no longer vote for example, because they died. One of our lists Speaker 2: 04:15 Part of our program, which it goes back to a federal law called the national voter registration act. A lot of individuals do use the acronym, which is NBRA, uh, really our federal as well as state laws that dictate how we are to maintain our voter registration file. Um, based off of that, we clean our files and maintain our files, uh, strictly based off of those federal and state rules. So what we do is before we send out any ballots, what we're going to be sending is this County wide mailer, we run what is known as the national change of address against that, to see who has potentially moved and then correspond with them, individuals that have maybe passed away. Um, we cleaned out our respective voter registration file. It's not necessarily a perfect a system though, because there's some lag time associated with it. And it's not in real time where all of this information has come into us and they automatically fall off the roads because we could potentially disenfranchise voters as well. Speaker 2: 05:12 That is, we would never send them a potentially a mail ballot. So we've gotta be very careful with that at the end of the day, though, every voter is given one ballot that they can vote on. And we turn back to our office. We find a situation where a person, we send out a mail ballot, but then their status changes. And so we have to suspend that ballot and reissue them a new one. No, that that second ballot has been suspended and we're tracking that ballot all mail bouts. Now here's a question from Candice Bremond. Hi, my name is Candace Fremont. I live in university Heights and my question is assuming I get my ballot in prior to the election. Is there any way to check the status of that ballot? The answer to your question is yes, there will a new service called where's my ballot that you can subscribe to. There will be push notifications to you. As soon as you subscribe, it's free of charge. And it's currently on our website, SD vote.com and it will push information as to the status of your mailbox as it's getting delivered to you. And then once you vote it and send it back, you can get push notification as it's working its way back to our office, as well as, uh, when we count at the ballot. Speaker 1: 06:21 No, I've seen some questions on social media about people worried about the signature. Um, Al ward writes if we submit a mail in ballot or a ballot, signature will be compared to the one on file. How can we update the signature on file? If we're concerned that our current signatures may not match our original one, Speaker 2: 06:40 The best answer to your question is, is by registering to vote. Um, you can do so in a number of ways, the safer way, considering that there's a pandemic is to do so online. And what will you will do is once you register to vote, it will pull your signature from the DMV and send that signature to us. Now, if you do not have a signature at the DMV, then it will prompt you to print it out, sign it and send it back to her. Our office will scan in that new registration form with your new signature. And that's what we'll compare your mail ballot against. Speaker 1: 07:17 I know some people are concerned that their signature might not be recognized by somebody and their vote might get disqualified. Is that a worry? Speaker 2: 07:25 I actually, there's a couple of laws that protects a voter. So once we check a signature off of the mail ballot against that on file, if we find out that it does not match, we are actually legally obligated to notify the voter that they have the ability to cure their signature by signing an affidavit and getting it back to our office. Speaker 1: 07:45 Rhonda scheisse asks if I mail my ballot back right away, does it get counted as soon as it's received or is it held until the older the ballots come in and if it's held, how secure is it from fire or, Speaker 2: 07:57 Yeah, so we have the ability once we send out the ballots and then we receive voted ballots back, uh, to be able to signature verify a first of all, we check it and make sure that it's the person who has voted this mail ballot. And then what we have the ability to do is then extract and scan and tabulate that ballot AF after it's been received, once it's been verified. Um, and that's frankly, we can start as soon as the mail ballots come back to our office, that's a change in the law I should mention because we would normally be able to signature verify, uh, but we could not extract and scan in that ballot until the 14th day prior to an election. But now with the change in the law, we can do as soon as we receive it. Speaker 1: 08:38 So what does that mean for election night? How many of the ballots that have already been received will have been counted? Speaker 2: 08:43 Well, we're hoping to get as many male ballots into the APM, a release on election night, but that will be really depend on voters. If they return it sooner to our office, the better it's going to be, because then we can, again, signature verify it, extract it, scan it into the system and then be able to report a API. But if it's too late for us to be able to get through those respective processes, then we most likely will have to wait until the post election day process and election results updates for it to get counted. Speaker 1: 09:14 How conclusive do you expect the results to be on election night? Speaker 2: 09:18 Well, with mail balloting being the predominant way that voters vote these days, it will depend on how many voting, uh, mail ballots have been returned to our office for us to be processed. And then ultimately get into the count. These days it's really extends out much further than just election day. So we're hoping that many of them there are wide gaps. That's always an election officials. Prayer is, is that there are wide margins regardless of who's winning, but at the end of the day, as we know that voters hang on to their mail ballots and they don't return them until closer to election day, we're hoping that's not the case this election, but if it happens to be the case, you know, these close contests could go all the way up until we certify the election, which is 30 days after election Bay. Speaker 1: 10:01 We've got a question here from one of our listeners who says a couple of months ago, I submitted an online application to volunteer at the polling booths anywhere on election day, but I haven't received a reply. Do you still need any help? Speaker 2: 10:13 Well, we are looking at that right now in terms of our poll worker force. As you can imagine, this pandemic has created, uh, across issues across the entire spectrum. Uh, we're not immune to that from an elections point of view in terms of conducting any elections. Uh, really what we're doing right now is kind of assessing how we're really going to conduct the election. Uh, we won't have your traditional neighborhood polling places on election day as voters have been accustomed to. Uh, as I mentioned earlier, is, is that pulling locations that we will have will be consumer consolidated, which we're having much larger facilities that we would need to operate from for social distancing purposes to keep everyone safe and healthy. Um, and as a result of that, we're having to change the dynamics of how we recruit poll workers, as well as train pull workers. Speaker 2: 11:02 Um, before in a traditional point place world, we would need 9,000 volunteer poll workers in this super consolidated world where we're thinking about 235 super sites, uh, we're going to need around 3,500 individuals, uh, across four days. That's a big change for our normal poll workers. The other considerations that we have to take in to account is, is that as opposed to working one day, it's going to be an eight day affair, four days to work potentially two days worth of training. Normally it's a two hour onsite training and as well as the site's set up one day and the breakdown the following day. So it's an eight day minimum commitment. Speaker 1: 11:41 So any last words of advice, Speaker 2: 11:44 We will be sending out a countywide Mandler to all registered voters this week. So voters could expect it within the next couple of weeks in their mailbox saying and telling them and stating all the different changes that will be occurring with this upcoming election. I think the most important aspect with this upcoming election is to right now is to everyone to check their status of their residence address as well as their mailing address, which will be on this mailer of what we have on file for them. And if it's different than they, these individuals would need to reregister devote with our office by simply going to SD vote. Dot com only takes two minutes. Speaker 3: 12:22 We've been speaking with Michael VU, who is San Diego counties, registrar of voters. Michael. Thank you. Thank you.