More than 43,000 Sonoma County ballots still to be counted

Four days after Tuesday’s primary election, about 43,000 ballots have yet to be counted in Sonoma County, a number that election officials say reflects both the popularity of voting by mail and challenges arriving at a final tally in a timely manner.

It will be several more weeks before the count is completed, election officials said Friday. The deadline to certify the election is July 7.

In the interim, the county will not issue updated vote counts, a standing practice that for years has garnered criticism from candidates and voters.

Assemblyman Marc Levine, D-San Rafael, joined the chorus of critics by referring to Sonoma County’s elections department “as possibly the biggest basket case of elections offices in CA” in a Twitter post on election night.

Levine was responding to concerns raised Tuesday night on social media that Sonoma County had not posted any results while neighboring Napa and Marin counties had both published initial vote counts. Sonoma County’s first results were posted at 8:28 p.m., 18 minutes behind Marin and 25 minutes slower than Napa, according to the secretary of state’s office.

“Many county election offices have no problem providing reliably consistent vote tallies in a more timely manner,” Levine said in an interview Friday. “Over the years, Sonoma County has done nothing to become more efficient with their system or provide a rationale for why it is unable to.”

The county’s deputy registrar of voters, Liz Acosta, defended the pace of the vote count Friday, saying “we choose accuracy over speed.” She said the voting system the county uses - and has used for 30 years - must be done to a specific legal protocol that can’t be interrupted without delaying the entire process.

“Honestly, we don’t have the resources to stop and do that every time we want to count ballots,” she said.

There are 43,324 outstanding ballots left to be counted from Tuesday’s primary election. The vast majority - 37,419 - are vote-by-mail ballots that were dropped off at polling places on the day of the election or arrived at the elections office too late for the initial count. The rest are provisional ballots.

So far, 124,253 ballots have been counted. The county’s preliminary voter turnout rate of 48.9 percent is not expected to change significantly based on the final results. Officials say the outstanding ballots also are not expected to change the outcome of any local races.

Contrary to some perceptions, Sonoma County was the 19th-fastest of the 58 counties in California to report initial results, according to the secretary of state’s office.

But of the 29 counties that have not updated results since election night, Sonoma County was the ninth-?slowest to post complete preliminary results, doing so at 2:03 a.m. For many candidates and political junkies, that felt like an eternity.

Since election night, 29 counties also have updated their counts to reflect vote-by-mail, provisional and other ballot totals. Sonoma County’s policy is to not issue further updates until the entire process is completed.

Sonoma County has a long history of delayed election results that officials have blamed on the late arrival of mail-in and provisional ballots. Since at least 2014, the county has explored buying new election equipment, setting aside $500,000 that year to study options. But that effort has yet to pay off.

“It takes a long time for government to allocate the money and choose the correct system,” said Sonoma County Supervisor Susan Gorin, who was elected to a second four-year term Tuesday night. “We want our voting system and machines to be as foolproof as possible. We don’t accept any voting irregularities.”

Bill Rousseau, the county’s registrar of voters, was unavailable for comment Friday, according to his staff.

David McCuan, a political scientist at Sonoma State University and a longtime observer of local elections, said the county historically has valued an accurate count over a quick count.

“This means we see an accurate count far past Election Day given the nature of the last-minute registrants, the dropped-off ballots and the integrity of an accurate count,” he said.

“It’s also frustrating as heck,” he added.

You can reach Staff Writer Derek Moore at 521-5336 or derek.moore?@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter ?@deadlinederek.