UPDATE, 10:42 a.m.: (PHOTOS) Arcata Gets Out The Vote
Just in case you forgot, these guys on the G Street pedestrian Bridge were helpfully reminding people about what’s going on today. Photos by Dezmond Remington.
It’s Election Day today — maybe the fourth-best holiday you don’t get the day off for — and Arcatans have begun trickling into the polling station and cramming ballot boxes. The traffic at the in-person voting center at the Arcata Community Center was far from gridlock, but the drop-off location at the Murphy’s grocery store in western Arcata was so full this morning voters were having a hard time slotting their ballots into it, a clerk there told the Outpost. It had been less than a day since election workers had emptied it.
Up for grabs today in Arcata are two seats on the city council and a measure to indefinitely extend a 0.75% sales tax. (Read more about that here.) There’s guaranteed to be at least one new member on the council.
A man puts a ballot in the box at the Sunny Brae Murphy’s.
Outside the voting center this morning.
— Dezmond Remington
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UPDATE, 10:16 a.m.: Federal Government to Deploy Election Monitors in LA, Alameda County, Sacramento and San Diego
Via the CalMatters live blog:
The Department of Justice is sending about 1,000 election monitors and observers out in the field today, including in four California areas: Los Angeles, Sacramento, San Diego and Alameda County, according to a DOJ news release. For the first time, federal monitors will be posted in all 50 states – making this the largest election monitoring effort in history.
“Election integrity has been one of the top priorities for this administration and this division,” Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon of the Civil Rights Division at the Department of Justice said in the release.
The monitors will be ensuring compliance with federal voting rights statutes, according to the release, including making sure people with disabilities are able to vote, and that there is no voter intimidation or suppression based on race, color, national origin or religion.
This news comes as democrats in California, including Gov. Gavin Newsom, have expressed concerns about federal interference in California’s election. Newsom and the state Democratic party are sending their own election monitors to polling locations to watch for voter suppression.
— CalMatters staff
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The Jefferson Center is open for business. Photo: Hank Sims.
It’s Election Day in America! Humboldt County is a part of America!
As per usual, even in the post-COVID era of long long election nights and fewer election parties, the Outpost is throwing together a little live blog to keep y’all abreast of developments around the county, with peeks at the state and national scene. We’ve got a cool new report-the-vote tool that will translate results from the cumbersome PDFs the county uses into something that is easy to read.
Now: It could be a very long night. As the Humboldt County Elections Office reported last week:
A recent change to California law allows county elections officials to extend voting hours at polling places if voting has been disrupted by certain violations of election law. Under Elections Code Sections 407 and 15152, if voting hours are extended at any polling place in California, all election officials across the state must wait until all polling places have closed before releasing election results.
The odds of that happening somewhere in California seem decently high this time around. So perhaps there will be no results available here in Humboldt County until late, late in the evening. We’ll see.
— Hank Sims