’We’ve been waiting four years’: Sonoma County sees a deluge of early voting

The yellow-vested man directing traffic on Fiscal Drive in Santa Rosa identified himself as Andre Dews.

“That’s D-E-W-S,” he said, “as in, Does Everything With Style.”

Dews did indeed exhibit a flair for his work, signaling and semaphoring to motorists thronging the Sonoma County Registrar of Voters office on Friday afternoon.

“At one point yesterday,” said Michael Waldorf, a county worker stationed at the drop box outside the office, Fiscal Drive “looked like the starting grid for the Indianapolis 500.”

While Election Day is Nov. 3, early voting in Sonoma County is underway — ballots for California’s first all-mail election went out on Oct. 5 — and it is “off the charts,” according to Deva Marie Proto, the registrar of voters.

That applies to both the United States, where more than 20 million votes have already been cast in 45 states, according to CNN; and to Sonoma County, where 297,482 residents are registered to vote. By the end of Friday, with the election still 18 days away, Proto’s office had received 57,825 ballots, representing nearly 20% of the county’s registered voters.

By comparison, just over 21,000 people in the county had voted by this time in 2016, Proto said.

Huge stakes, short lines

Citizens eager to cast their ballots had three options at the Registrar of Voters office. They could pull up to a drive-thru drop box, or park their car and walk their ballot to a different box, this one under the pop-up tent outside the office.

Or they could walk inside and — after having their temperature taken — vote in person, the option chosen by Alexa Forrester and her husband, Chris Guenther. The couple brought their sons, Cam, 13, and Eben, 9, “as a civics lesson.”

While they usually drop off their ballots closer to home, Guenther said, “this year, with such an important election, we wanted to experience it up close. And we wanted make sure our votes are counted by Election Day.”

“We’ve been waiting four years to cast these ballots,” added Forrester. “As soon as we could do it, we did it.”

Thanks to the efforts of Waldorf, Dews and those working inside the Registrar of Voters office, wait times were minimal to nonexistent. Forrester was thankful her family did not have to deal with long lines seen elsewhere in the country. On the first day of early voting in Georgia, some people waited as long as 11 hours to cast their ballots.

To make voting safer and more convenient during the COVID-19 pandemic, 20 of the stout, red, white and blue drop boxes have been installed throughout Sonoma County. Ballots are collected from those boxes “every couple days,” Proto said.

’It was like people didn’t care’

Earlier on Friday, Tracie Barrows slid a pair of ballots into the drop box on Grove Street, outside city hall in Healdsburg. They belonged to her parents, Barrows explained. She’d mailed her own ballot four days earlier.

Like many of the 15 or so voters a reporter spoke with Friday, Barrows was motivated by a unique urgency to exercise her right — something she had not felt in previous elections. As a girl, she said, she had experienced abuse. The accusations of sexual assault leveled against President Donald Trump before the 2016 election had traumatized her, as had his victory.

“It was like people didn’t care. They voted for him anyway,” she said. “So this four years has been really tough.”

Four more years of Trump, agreed Diane Wilson, would be “horrific.” She paused, before releasing her grip on the blue envelope. “Are these picked up regularly?” Assured that they were, she dropped it in.

Wilson had thought about mailing her ballot but ruled it out. Recent steps taken by Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, a former Trump megadonor, have slowed mail delivery, eroding her trust in the agency. In August, Trump suggested in an interview with Fox Business Network that he was denying emergency funding for the post office to hinder voting by mail.

She dropped her ballot off just after 20-something Kyle Rau, who was voting in his second presidential election. “This election will have such a dramatic impact on the future of our country,” said Rau. “It’s not that I love Joe Biden — this is more of an anti-Trump vote.

“It feels good to get it in early.”

All but a few of the early voters who spoke to this reporter were eager to see Trump defeated.

One of those who said they were voting for Trump was Kim from Santa Rosa, a 50-something woman in a Lincoln Navigator. Asked why it was important to vote early, she said she’d “been hearing things about ballots getting dumped in garbage cans,” so she wanted to drop hers off in person. Another concern: a rise in “left-wing violence.”

Her concern echoed the claim made the previous evening by President Trump in his NBC town hall. The president spoke ominously of “thousands” of ballots with his name on them “dumped in dumpsters … dumped in garbage cans.” Those claims are false.

From the opposite end of the political spectrum came Alycia Asai of Santa Rosa, rocking a Ruth Bader Ginsburg mask and describing herself as “excessively frustrated with our political process and political discourse,” and “very excited” to vote.

Like Asai, Joe Otos of Windsor didn’t want to mail his ballot.

Why not? As it says on the envelope, you don’t even need a stamp. “Well,” he said, “certain agencies that shouldn’t be political” — he mentioned the post office and the Food and Drug Administration — “have become political.

“I just want to make sure it gets tallied.”

Joanie Blechel drove to Fiscal Drive from Forestville, where she lives. “But I was determined to come right to the Registrar of Voters,” she said, “because of what’s going on with the mail.”

By any means necessary

Bruce Gorden could’ve used the drop box at the Center for the Arts in Sebastopol, where he lives with his wife, Edy Ullman. But they weren’t sure if that box was guarded, or how often it’s emptied. So they drove their ballots “to the source,” as he put it.

How long had he been waiting for this moment?

“About 3½ years.”

Any other time, in all our years of voting, said Vanessa Mitchell, who lives in the Larkfield-Wikiup area of Santa Rosa, “we’d just put the ballots in the mailbox and raise the flag.”

Concerns this year about the Postal Service convinced her to hand-deliver them.

She didn’t realize, until arriving at Fiscal Drive, there was a drive-through drop box available.

“I was prepared to park, get out of the car and walk a f-----g mile if I had to – pardon my French. I was ready to stand in line, to do whatever I needed to do to get this vote counted.”

You can reach Staff Writer Austin Murphy at 707-521-5214 or austin.murphy@pressdemocrat.com or on Twitter @ausmurph88.