“Ultimately, all voting will be by mail,” predicted Joe Canciamilla, Contra Costa County Clerk-Recorder and Registrar of Voters, speaking at the League’s third-Saturday public meeting on May 19. “I need 1,000 poll workers on election day” he said, noting that it is getting too hard to find polling sites and poll workers and vote-by-mail is less costly for the county.
There are 600,000 registered voters in Contra Costa County, and almost 70% already receive permanent vote-by mail ballots, he explained.
Canciamilla had just come from a training session with poll workers and inspectors on the new election machines. Voters will access a computer screen by using a remote or a touch screen to cast their votes. Their ballot will then be printed out and scanned. The computer will have no memory or wi-fi so it cannot be hacked, he assured the audience. There will always be a paper ballot as a record.
Setting up the ballot is an enormous undertaking for his office. His staff has 600 different ballot types to prepare, because the cities, school districts and special districts have different boundaries which must be sent to specific voters. Because of a change in equipment to prepare the ballots, he was able to put the long list of candidates for governor, for example, all on one page instead of having to split the list into two pages. This resulted in a $40,000 saving. Since all state ballot measures have been moved to the November election, that ballot will be much longer and more complicated to prepare.
Canciamilla was concerned about the move to district elections in Concord, Martinez, Antioch and other cities. Cities are given 45 days to begin the process and 90 days to adopt the districts or be subject to legal exposure. “This rapid pace doesn’t allow community engagement,” he said. He added that the loss of the local press adds to the concern that voters will be confused. An additional problem is the need for quick-turnaround in his office to prepare ballots based on the new district boundaries.
Canciamilla was reassuring about the privacy and safety of our ballots. The county’s server is not connected to any other server, making it quite secure from ballot tampering. Based on his experience with other registrars, “Ballot tampering is not really seen here or around the country,” he stated.
