Humboldt County clerk explains election safeguards and same-day registration

Well, that makes sense.

Now, California seems to take a longer time than other states to produce election results.

And I know you all have a film that walks people through what happens when you put your ballot into a box.

Can you walk us through that process?

Yeah, we have a film called The Life Cycle of a Ballot.

The idea came from a being a child that grew up in the 90s and early 2000s with those How It's Made TV shows.

You know, the process starts when we mail those ballots out to voters.

They will fill it out and do what they got to do and return it to us either by Dropbox, mail, or in person.

From there, we bring them into our custody.

We log everything and make sure we have everything accounted.

At that point, we run the ballots through our Blue Crest Fluence machine.

which is a mail sorting machine, essentially.

And what that does is it takes a picture of the front of your ballot that has the ballot information and your signature.

We use that to check your signature to make sure that you've signed your ballot envelope.

At least two people check that signature, sometimes three or four when there are close calls.

After we verify that it was you and that you haven't already voted and that it's an eligible ballot, We mark it as such.

Those get sorted out.

Anything that has an issue, we process differently.

We'll get into that at the end.

But those that are ready to be counted will then go through a process where we have a ballot opening team.

And so those folks will come in, and they have a very methodical process where they remove ballots from envelopes.

It's still a manual process.

Machines haven't quite figured out a way to scale that one.

They do it in such a way that we protect your identity, so the ballots aren't being checked, they're just being removed.

Ballot envelopes are face down, so the identity of a voter is never

Well, that makes sense.

Now, California seems to take a longer time than other states to produce election results.

And I know you all have a film that walks people through what happens when you put your ballot into a box.

Can you walk us through that process?

Yeah, we have a film called The Life Cycle of a Ballot.

The idea came from a being a child that grew up in the 90s and early 2000s with those How It's Made TV shows.

You know, the process starts when we mail those ballots out to voters.

They will fill it out and do what they got to do and return it to us either by Dropbox, mail, or in person.

From there, we bring them into our custody.

We log everything and make sure we have everything accounted.

At that point, we run the ballots through our Blue Crest Fluence machine.

which is a mail sorting machine, essentially.

And what that does is it takes a picture of the front of your ballot that has the ballot information and your signature.

We use that to check your signature to make sure that you've signed your ballot envelope.

At least two people check that signature, sometimes three or four when there are close calls.

After we verify that it was you and that you haven't already voted and that it's an eligible ballot, We mark it as such.

Those get sorted out.

Anything that has an issue, we process differently.

We'll get into that at the end.

But those that are ready to be counted will then go through a process where we have a ballot opening team.

And so those folks will come in, and they have a very methodical process where they remove ballots from envelopes.

It's still a manual process.

Machines haven't quite figured out a way to scale that one.

They do it in such a way that we protect your identity, so the ballots aren't being checked, they're just being removed.

Ballot envelopes are face down, so the identity of a voter is never