The Humboldt County Office of Elections made an unnerving discovery Monday: a stack of 596 sealed ballots from the most recent election left at the bottom of a locked voting drop box.<\/p>\n
The uncounted ballots would not have affected the outcome of the November statewide special election for Proposition 50, the county office said in a news release Wednesday. However, officials said they\u2019re working hard to have all the votes legally counted.<\/p>\n
The office discovered that the ballots were uncounted because of a staff error. When workers checked the drop box, there was a miscommunication about whether it had been fully emptied, the office said. <\/p>\n
\u201cThat outcome is unacceptable and runs counter to the core of what this office stands for,\u201d Juan Pablo Cervantes, county clerk-recorder and registrar of voters, said in a statement. \u201cWhile the mistake occurred after an election worker did not follow proper procedures, the responsibility for what happened ultimately sits with me.\u201d<\/p>\n
After the ballots were discovered, elections staff confirmed that the sealed ballots had not been tampered with, and they worked with the California secretary of state to determine next steps. Under California law, the ballots should have been counted before the election was certified on Dec. 5 and destroyed six months later. <\/p>\n
The Office of Elections said it had altered its protocols to ensure such a mistake does not take place again, implementing a new \u201clock out, tag out\u201d procedure to ensure each drop box is empty and secured before election results are finalized. <\/p>\n
\u201cI promise you that we are taking this seriously,\u201d Cervantes said. \u201cWe will strengthen our processes and continue pushing toward the standard our community expects and deserves.\u201d<\/p>\n
The discovery comes as California continues to be under a microscope for allegations of voter fraud.<\/p>\n
Within minutes of polls opening for California\u2019s special election in November, President Trump took to Truth Social<\/a> to claim that the Proposition 50 vote<\/a> \u2014 which redrew several congressional districts to favor Democratic candidates \u2014 was rigged.<\/p>\n \u201cThe Unconstitutional Redistricting Vote in California is a GIANT SCAM in that the entire process, in particular the Voting itself, is RIGGED,\u201d Trump wrote.<\/p>\n When asked later that day to explain Trump\u2019s claims on how the election was allegedly rigged, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said California has \u201ca universal mail-in voting system, which we know is ripe for fraud.\u201d She also accused the state of counting ballots from undocumented immigrants. <\/p>\n Elections officials and Democratic leaders, including Gov. Gavin Newsom, decried those claims as baseless. \u201cThe bottom line is California elections have been validated by the courts,\u201d California Secretary of State Shirley Weber said in a November statement.<\/p>\n More recently, Republican gubernatorial candidate Chad Bianco has drawn scrutiny<\/a> for using his position as Riverside County sheriff to seize some 650,000 ballots<\/a> in the county to determine whether they were fraudulently counted. Critics decried the move as another attempt by Republican election deniers to disenfranchise voters.<\/p>\n Humboldt County, which encompasses 4,052 square miles of rural California below the Oregon border, has largely avoided election-related turmoil in recent years. In 2008, however, Humboldt election officials discovered that software they used to tally votes had failed to count 197 ballots<\/a> from one precinct. <\/p>\n More recently, nearby Shasta County has become a hotbed of election denialism and MAGA politics<\/a>, with its Board of Supervisors voting in 2023 to end the use of Dominion Voting Systems machines<\/a> in favor of pursuing a hand-counting system. <\/p>\n Times staff writers Hailey Branson-Potts, Jenny Jarvie and Ana Ceballos contributed to this report. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Humboldt County Office of Elections made an unnerving discovery Monday: a stack of 596 sealed ballots from…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":26097,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[738,15959,15957,10208,15963,609,15961,8,15962,9,15958,1688,542,6583,15960,7,742,1691],"class_list":{"0":"post-26096","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-top-stories","8":"tag-ballot","9":"tag-box","10":"tag-california-county","11":"tag-claim","12":"tag-county-clerk-recorder","13":"tag-election","14":"tag-election-official","15":"tag-headlines","16":"tag-humboldt-county-office","17":"tag-news","18":"tag-november","19":"tag-office","20":"tag-president-trump","21":"tag-proposition","22":"tag-statewide-special-election","23":"tag-top-stories","24":"tag-vote","25":"tag-voter"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@news\/116538821983964872","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26096","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26096"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26096\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/26097"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26096"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26096"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26096"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}