FRESNO COUNTY – The Fresno County elections office is ready to put the November general election behind it as election certification and recount activities complete.
The Fresno County Board of Supervisors formally received the certified results of the Nov. 5 consolidated general election and declared the candidates with majority vote totals as officially elected during the Dec. 17 Board of Supervisors meeting. The board unanimously voted to receive the results after hearing a brief presentation on election activity from Fresno County Clerk/Registrar of Voters James Kus.
Kus highlighted some interesting statistics that Fresno County saw this past election season and noted improvements in processes his department will implement moving forward. One aspect of the election that stood out was that although percentage-wise the voter turnout was the second lowest Fresno County has seen this century, the number of total voters who cast ballots was the second highest, Kus said.
“Just an interesting statistical event there, where the increased registration has meant that our percentage turnout has gone down while actual physical ballots being counted — voters voting — has gone up,” Kus said.
In total, 330,000 voters cast their ballot in Fresno County for the Nov. 5 election, a turnout of 64.7%. Kus said the only election this century that saw a higher number of voter participation was the November 2020 presidential election.
Kus said 63,000 voters received assistance at a Fresno County vote center, which was a 400% increase from the March primary and a 20% increase from the November 2020 election. Additionally, 66% of the voters who received assistance at an in-person vote center did so on Election Day.
With a high number of voters opting to cast their ballots in person, Kus said there were long lines at some vote centers on Election Day, despite multiple options for early voting within the county. Kus said some vote centers had more early voting activity than others, and with varying physical capacity limits at vote centers, the elections office will need to consider additional polling locations for high turnout elections to cut down on long lines.
“The department had been warning the public that lines would occur on Election Day for several months — really four months ahead of time — but it was still surprising how many voters waited until the very last minute on Election Day,” Kus said.
Fresno County supervisors did not have any comments to provide on the election presentation Kus gave, though Chairman Nathan Magsig did ask Kus to address once more some of the errors the elections office ran into. Throughout November, the elections office identified and investigated the circumstances behind ballot address errors that resulted in incorrect ballots being sent out and subsequently cast by 295 voters.
“This error did not impact the result of any contest in Fresno County, so the department was able to move forward with certifying the election results,” Kus said. “The department has begun corrective actions to properly precinct the addresses affected this election and ensure that this process cannot cause harm before it is ever used again.”
Additionally, Kus said that all county ballot drop boxes will be rekeyed after a key was left in a ballot drop box in October. The situation was immediately addressed and the key was secured at the drop box site; however, Kus said this way, “even with that key being out there for a little while, all future elections that key is now worthless.”
The elections office also instituted new protocols for drop box access, including a key log and checkout process so that keys are not assigned by location but are under strict control.
Kus also reiterated that the electronic ballot tabulation machines Fresno County uses to conduct its primary ballot counts have been shown to return 100% accurate results through audits conducted every election. The department, as required by state law, conducted a manual tally of 1% of the ballots cast this election, and Kus said that out of 12,000 ballots audited, no machine errors were found. The only error discovered through the audit was a human error involving the review of an overvote, Kus said.
Fresno County conducted two recounts after election results were certified on Dec. 3; one for the Laguna Irrigation District Division 2, which initially showed a tie between two candidates, and one for Kingsburg Joint Union High School District’s Measure K. Kus told the board of supervisors that both recounts ended in a change of election results.
For the Laguna Irrigation District, the recount found that election staff had counted a ballot twice, and so one of the candidates won election by a single vote. The Measure K recount also changed the election outcome, with Measure K moving from narrowly failing to narrowly passing between votes cast across the three counties the school district sits in.
The Fresno County elections office is now working on cleaning up its voter rolls and administering a special election in March within the city of Fresno to fill a Fresno City Council seat left vacant by Luis Chavez’s election to the board of supervisors.
