INSIDE THE COUNT
Lewis Jones has been working the Mammoth polls since 2004. On Tuesday, at 6:15 a.m, he began his long day as an elections coordinator at the Mono County Civic Center and finished up at 8:30 p.m.
When the polls opened at 7:00 a.m., a line of voters were already waiting outside. Jones was surprised by the large number of young people showing up to vote.
“The last time I saw this many young voters was when medical marijuana legalization was on the ballot,” he said.
There also seemed to be many first-time voters, many of whom had to cast provisional ballots.
Provisional ballots, which are placed in pink envelopes, are used when a voter’s eligibility or registration status is uncertain. These ballots are typically cast by people who are not registered to vote in the county but may also be used by those who are registered in other counties or states but didn’t receive their ballots in time.
Christine Gramlich, a provisional ballot worker at the Civic Center, confirmed that there were a lot of provisional ballots. She had a full folder of completed pink envelopes in front of her. These provisional ballots require a different process to count than ballots received by mail or through the ballot counting machines.
The different ways to vote, overall, makes the ballot counting process complex and lengthy for poll workers, Jones said.
So I reached out to Salena Ybarra, Assistant Clerk of the Mono County Board of Supervisors, for a behind-the-scenes look at Election Day. She’d spent most of Tuesday coordinating and processing mail-in ballots.
Ybarra picked up the ballots from the Bridgeport post office around 2:00 p.m. Her team then spent hours flattening the folded ballots to ensure they could be scanned and processed by the election machines. Flattening the ballots is a crucial step, as folded ballots often get jammed in the counting machines.
By the time the polls closed at 8:00 p.m., over 3,000 mail-in ballots had been processed, and polling stations across the county began preparing their ballots for transport to the Bridgeport central ballot counting location.
Three separate transport teams were tasked with collecting the ballots and ensuring they were safely delivered to the central counting location in Bridgeport. The final batch of ballots arrived in Bridgeport by 10:45 p.m., and once all the ballots were logged, they were secured for the next day’s count.
By Wednesday afternoon, Ybarra’s office still had at least 1,400 ballots left to process. “I’m anxious to get through it all, but we’re almost there,” she said.
For ballots cast in person at the polls, the counting process is more automated. Voting machines tally the votes, and memory cards are removed at the end of the night and uploaded into the election system. This system allows officials to report preliminary results quickly, but those results are not necessarily final.
Election workers also cross-check the system to verify each voter’s eligibility and ensure that no one votes more than once, Ybarra explained.
Provisional ballots, however, require a manual review, which makes them the most time-consuming part of the process. These ballots are examined to confirm each voter’s eligibility in Mono County, including verifying their registration status and current address. If the information doesn’t match the records, the ballots are forwarded to the voter’s home county or state to be counted.
The county received at least 100 provisional ballots, Ybarra said. It’s up to Election Clerk Queenie Barnard to go through them all.
As a result, while the initial results on Election Night are considered “semi-official”—reflecting the machine counts and mail-in ballots received before the polls closed—the final, official tally takes longer, especially as provisional ballots are reviewed and processed.
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