Placer voters skipped the envelope and wait on Election Day

The line to drop off a ballot at the Placer County Elections Office ran out the door on Tuesday afternoon. According to Ryan Ronco, Placer County's Clerk-Recorder and Registrar of Voters, most people in it did not know there was an alternative way to vote that would have let them skip the line and the wait. Ronco has worked in the elections office for 33 years and has run it for the last 10; for most of that time, he has tried to find ways to process ballots faster and more efficiently. "California has a problem, or a perceived problem, that we take a long time to count our ballots," he said. "It's all about trying to find where the bottlenecks are." The county's newest tool to speed up ballot counting is a program it calls Sign, Scan & Go. With this program, a voter could fill out a mail-in ballot at home, then take it to any vote center and feed it into a scanner. The ballots are counted on the spot and show up in the election night results. A ballot delivered the normal way goes through a lengthy process of checks, like signature verification, before it's sent to the tabulators to be counted. Ronco's office processes all of the county's ballots with a crew of 15 full-time staffers and seasonal help, working 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. "We're not going to count it tonight," he said Tuesday, gesturing to the envelopes stacking up in the hallway. "We just can't get through all the steps." A scanned ballot skipped every one of them. "Every single person that takes the time to check in, they can open that envelope and count their ballot right now; that's one fewer ballot that we have to count after," Ronco said. The county started offering Sign, Scan & Go in the 2024 primary, after the Legislature allowed it the year before. By the November 2024 presidential election, Ronco said, the share of Placer voters casting ballots in person had gone from about 5 percent to 23.7 percent, the highest in the state. "We shaved three and a half days off," he said. Roughly 90 percent of the people who voted early and in-person this election had used the Sign, Scan & Go scanners. However, most voters who voted on Election Day by dropping sealed envelopes in a bin were not aware of the Sign, Scan & Go option. "They don't know about Sign, Scan & Go," he said. "They didn't know that they could do it early." Ronco thinks the solution is to increase awareness of the new program. If half the county's voters scanned their own ballots, he said, the office could have nearly everything counted within a few days instead of a few weeks. "That's the goal," he said. "If we can get to 50 percent, we would have virtually all our ballots counted."