Why Is Alameda County’s Vote Count So Slow? Official Blasts Sluggish Pace

A veteran member of the Alameda County Board of Supervisors said he’s frustrated with the snail-like pace of the county’s vote reporting, delaying results in two highly anticipated recall elections and other contests.

Supervisor Keith Carson, who is about to retire from the board after eight terms, said he shares voters’ unhappiness with the county registrar’s tally, which so far has worked its way through roughly a third of ballots cast in Tuesday’s general election.

“Many have contacted my office to express their dismay/anger regarding the small number of votes that have been counted to date, while all of our surrounding counties are posting a greater number of results,” Carson said in a statement on Friday. “I share your dismay.”

Carson’s remarks came after the registrar’s office posted an update Thursday evening that reported just 4,589 new votes tabulated since the final election night report at 1:03 a.m. Wednesday.

That update brought the total number of ballots tallied so far to 238,035, according to the office. Assuming an 80% turnout among Alameda County’s 962,000 registered voters, which would align with recent presidential elections, that would mean the registrar still has a backlog of about 530,000 ballots to process.

Those ballots hold the answer to a number of closely watched contests, including recall votes for District Attorney Pamela Price and Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao and dozens of legislative, mayoral, city council and ballot measure races across the county.

Thursday evening’s results showed both recalls winning with about 65% of the vote. They would pass with a majority vote.

“I understand the public is interested in getting results very quickly,” registrar Tim Dupuis said in an interview on Friday, adding that he expects the process to speed up.

“What we typically see is a slow start, and then we ramp up,” Dupuis said. He said his office’s main challenge is the 460,000 mail-in ballots received on Election Day.

“It takes time to get those ballots queued up so that we can get them through our tally system,” he said. “You have to check the signatures. You have to sort them, you have to open them. You have to extract the ballot from the envelope. You have to stage it so that our tally system is ready for it.”

In his statement, Carson questioned whether Dupuis had hired enough workers for the vote count.

“Months ago, in public meetings, I asked the registrar if he had a sufficient workforce and resources in order to carry out the November election,” Carson said. “His response was ‘yes.’ Unfortunately, that appears not to be the case.”

Dupuis said his department is more focused on getting all votes processed by the state’s 30-day deadline for counties to certify election results than on delivering fast results.

“So the issue really is the balance between having enough staff to get the selection certified within the time allotted versus trying to have the results as quickly as possible,” he said. “If the concern is to increase the speed at which we are able to post and get final results out, especially given the large number of vote-by-mail ballots, there’s a number of things that we could look at. We could look at more staffing, we could look at more equipment, we could look at more state-of-the-art facilities. ”

While Dupuis’ office has gained a reputation for slow and sometimes inefficient operations, Alameda County is not alone in its long, drawn-out vote reporting this election.

Contra Costa, Marin and Napa counties, for instance, have not reported updated results since their final election night reports. Two other counties, San Mateo and Sonoma, say they’ve processed fewer than 10,000 ballots since election night.

On the other end of the spectrum, Santa Clara County processed twice the number of votes Alameda County did on election night — 468,395 versus 233,246. Dupuis credited Santa Clara’s performance to having more staff and twice as much high-speed sorting capacity.