San Joaquin County Registrar of Voters prepares for primary with election night staff training

With Election Day approaching, the San Joaquin County Registrar of Voters is making final preparations to ensure a smooth tabulation process come Tuesday.

Behind every election are people behind-the-scenes working to make sure every vote truly counts. The San Joaquin ROV warehouse is where the central count will happen on Tuesday night. There's six receiving centers throughout the county and their staff was trained so everyone's on the same page in two days.

Leading the whole operation is Olivia Hale, who grew up in the county, and is counting down until the official vote counts on Tuesday, who said Sunday is "all about tying up any final preparation for the election, making sure that everyone's aware of their assignment for Election Day."

"As a born and raised San Joaquin County resident, I'm honored to be able to serve our county and to be able to be the leader of what we have going on here in our elections," Olivia Hale, San Joaquin County registrar of voters, said. "And these last hours are about articulating every plan that we've been putting forward for the last several months. We plan for an election a year out in many cases, and there's a lot of prep work that goes into it."

Hale said they'll have almost 2,000 people in the field at receiving centers, polling places, rovers in the field, and their staff on-site at their downtown Stockton office.

"We do everything in our office to make sure every ballot is tabulated and counted accurately," Hale said. "And so trusting that process and understanding election administration is one piece. Politics are a different piece. And our job as election administrators is to ensure that there's fair, secure, accessible elections. So when you participate in our elections, you're entrusting your vote to our office, and we're making sure that it's tabulated correctly and that your voice is heard."

A part of that is ensuring everyone working on Election Day is trained and Hale said there's several trainings gearing up for election time with some of the first being their downtown staff who pick up and drop boxes for the 29 days leading up to the election. And five weeks before the election, they began election officer training for field inspectors, inspectors, clerks, and students working at the polls, which has been ongoing. 

Then, ahead of election time, they train support staff for election night, including Stocktonian Patricia Barrett, who's been working at the polls off-and-on for the past four decades. This year, she's the receiving center manager at the Christian Life building, which will also act as a supply hub in the morning starting at 6 am on Tuesday.

"This training is really important," Barrett said. "Number one, we're all on the same page. Communication is there. Accountability is there. We don't go walking around in our clouds up going, 'Now what am I supposed to do, right? So your role is described to you' that night will be very confusing for a lot of people, especially newbies. And so for someone that has to have some kind of experience to say, 'OK, wait, no, I don't want you doing that. Hand it to them. That's their job.'"

For this primary in particular, with more than 60 candidates running for California governor, Barrett said she's skeptical and worried about it–along with the local level.

"I kept looking at the list and I was like, 'Who do you vote for?'," Barrett said. "And I had phone calls going, 'Who do you vote for?' And I'm like, 'I don't even know who I want to vote for', because you hear all the scandal about all these candidates and then you don't even know most of them. So it was very complicating to me. Sometimes I feel like they should cut it at five. The first five can run or file. But I am real skeptical about this one and I'm real skeptical at the local level, too. It's got me worried."

Nonetheless, Barrett said she's seen this county work diligently with transparency and securely in tabulating the votes.

"We have a lot of public comments with doubt on how our voting system is ran." Barrett said. "So for me, it means that I can be a witness that the ROV, Registered Voters, is doing an excellent job, 100% secure, no fraud, or as little as possible, but it is corrected through the Sheriff's Department. They do work diligently, but it's just really important to me that I don't have doubts, and then people that associate with me, they don't have doubts. And so we have that working team of, no, our system works."

Hale said there will be a sheriff's escort showing up on Tuesday. Then, the ballots will be boxed up Tuesday night and head back downtown, finishing the process until they're done with certification.

"I'm going to tell you this, if you don't vote, don't complain," Barrett said.

Hale said the supplies come back from polling places on election night to the receiving centers. Then, they'll go on their box trucks to the warehouse, where the tabulation occurs for all of the polling place precinct ballots, separating out provisional and voting-by-mail returns 

"Even though there are people that may believe that your voice doesn't matter, it does, it matters at the state level, but it also matters at the local level, and your engagement is important," Hale said.