The Board of Supervisors Tuesday will consider whether to direct the Riverside County Office of the Registrar of Voters to increase the manual tally of ballots after the polls close in the March 5 primary election as part of an enhanced transparency process.
“A key component of the work done by the (registrar) is maintaining public confidence in honest and impartial elections that are conducted in a fair, efficient and accurate manner,” Supervisors Kevin Jeffries and Karen Spiegel wrote in documents posted to the board’s agenda for Tuesday.
The supervisors are jointly requesting the entire board’s backing for a 2% manual tally of ballots — instead of conducting the state-minimum 1% — to “strengthen public trust.”
California law mandates that ballots from 1% of precincts that are randomly selected by counties’ election officials be vetted after the results have been tabulated but not yet certified. The verification process is to identify potential discrepancies, technical failures and fraud.
Doubling the tally after the March 5 primary would cost the county an additional $360,000 above what’s been budgeted in the 2023-24 fiscal year, according to the supervisors.
They’re also proposing a pilot project for “risk-limiting audits,” which provide another layer of scrutiny in tight election contests.
“This process provides for elections officials to manually tally randomly selected ballots … stopping as soon as it is implausible that a full recount would show a different result than the ballots reviewed,” Jeffries and Spiegel wrote.
Because the new “risk-limiting audit” will require additional training, the supervisors said the primary election would not be an appropriate time to inaugurate it.
“The recommendation from (Registrar of Voters Art Tinoco) is to pilot this on an upcoming special election, smaller in scale, before implementing it in a future statewide election,” according to the proposal.
Since the November 2020 general election, civic activists have come before the board on multiple occasions, identifying what they argue is evidence of fraud and deficiencies with electronically processed ballots.
On Jan. 27, members of the nonprofit New California State held demonstration paper ballot elections, with manually tabulated results at locations statewide, including Murrieta, to showcase what they said were the benefits of returning to hand counts over machine counts.
Jeffries spearheaded formation of an independent election integrity committee following the 2020 election for the purpose of advising the registrar and board on how to make the county’s election apparatus more transparent and efficient.