At least 66,000 uncounted ballots remain in Sonoma County

Sonoma County elections officials said about 66,000 ballots remained uncounted as of Thursday afternoon, an updated total that includes mostly mail-in ballots dropped off at polling places or mailed in too late to be tallied on Election Day.

More ballots are expected to arrive by mail today at the county’s main elections office in Santa Rosa, said Deva Proto, the incoming clerk-?recorder-assessor and elections chief. Proto said the U.S. Post Office delivered about 800 ballots Thursday.

Proto said elections staff have not yet begun to tally the remaining ballots toward election results. An extensive process of signature verification and ballot sorting must be completed first.

“We have to verify the signatures before we can even start removing ballots from the envelopes,” Proto said.

It will likely be several days before the blue mail-in ballot envelopes are opened and their votes registered, she said. Of the estimated 66,000 untallied ballots, some 57,000 are vote-by-mail ballots. The bulk of the remainder are provisional ballots cast by voters who thought they were eligible but were not showing on the precinct roster, or by vote-by-mail voters who did not have their mail-in ballot. About 500 are conditional ballots cast by voters who registered late.

Thursday’s estimates do not include ballots expected to arrive by mail at the county elections office today, Proto said.

Late-arriving mail-in ballots slow down the vote counting process because it takes much longer to certify them. Votes cast Tuesday are certified on the spot by polling place workers.

In Sonoma County, 202,000 mail-in ballots were sent to voters. Of these, only 96,622 mail-in ballots were returned early enough to be counted on Election Day. Only about 36,000 votes were cast by people entering a precinct polling booth.

In Mendocino County, elections officials reported late Thursday that there were 16,730 mail-in and 1,011 provisional ballots yet to be counted. Mendocino County Assessor-?County Clerk-Recorder ?Susan Ranochak said there were 3,288 uncounted ballots in the Board of Supervisors’ 3rd District and 3,210 in the 5th District.

Ranochak said there were 2,900 uncounted ballots in Ukiah, 776 in Willits and 1,300 in Fort Bragg.

Proto said due to the large number of voters in Sonoma County, uncounted ballots have not yet been sorted by precinct or region. She said election workers began checking signatures on Thursday.