The drop box at the Humboldt County Elections Office on Sixth Street has seen some action. Photo: Andrew Goff.

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PREVIOUSLY (2020):

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Voting has been going on for almost a month! Isn’t that amazing?

If you just woke up from a five-year coma, you might not know that there was a global pandemic that changed a whole lot of things — not least, in California, the way we cast ballots. Nowadays every registered voter gets mailed a ballot well before the election. You can fill it out at home, if you like, or mail it in, or drop it off at a drop box, or take it to one of the shrinking number of actual polling places to vote in-person, like you used to do.

This new system means that election workers are able to tally a large percentage of the vote before polls close (still 8 p.m. Tuesday, by the way). And though you’d think this means we’d get final results quicker, in fact that’s only true in the case of a blowout election. The large expansion of the number of ways to vote — vote-by-mail, same-day registration, provisional ballots, etc. — makes it something of a bear to account for every last ballot cast, to make sure it is the one true vote registered per citizen.

Humboldt County’s Clerk-Recorder/Registrar of Voters, Juan Pablo Cervantes, tells us that his office has received 36,390 ballots as of this morning, which is about 43% of the number of ballots issued. Cervantes says that they’re hoping to process as many of those as they can before the polls close tomorrow. That’ll be the first vote tally update to be issued by the Elections Office sometime shortly after 8 p.m.

Forty-three percent turnout one day before actual Election Day sounds pretty good, but in fact it’s a bit down over the numbers four years ago. At this point in the 2020 cycle, the office had gotten back more than half of the number of ballots it had issued. When all was said and done, the county ended up with 81 percent voter turnout that year.

Are fewer people going to vote this year? Or was it just that fewer people planned to vote in-person in 2020, at the height of the pandemic? There’s no way to know! We’ll have to wait and see! Catch us back here tomorrow for all the usual LoCO Election Day fun.

Have you submitted your ballot yet? Are you unsure about how to do so? Well, in addition to the good old U.S. Mail — make sure you get it postmarked today or tomorrow! — you have the myriad options listed in this handy chart that went out with your voting materials.