Ballot counting was faster across Sacramento region this election. What changed?
While California and its 58 counties have long faced criticism for slow vote counting, capital region election offices are nearing the finish line in processing ballots from the June 2 primary, thanks to changes aimed at speeding up the count.
“I think we finished, like, something like a week ahead of where we were in the last election,” said Ken Casparis, a spokesperson for Sacramento County’s Voter Registration and Elections office.
Election officials in Sacramento and Placer counties credited investments in new technology, additional staff and changes to ballot-processing procedures for helping to accelerate the count.
For Sacramento County, the faster turnaround was the result of several changes to the ballot-counting process, including the purchase of an additional mail sorter. Because about 94% of voters in the county vote by mail, in-person voting has little effect on how quickly the county processes elections, Casparis said.
Once received, mail ballots are fed through a mail sorter, which takes a photo of the signatures on each ballot envelope. Signature verification staff then use the photos to compare signatures against those in voter files. Afterwards, ballot envelopes are sent through the mail sorter a second time to separate envelopes with signatures that do not match voter records from the rest of the ballots.
Long-planned changes pay off
In previous years, the county elections office’s single mail sorter carried out both steps, processing hundreds of thousands of envelopes twice. This election, the purchase of a second mail sorter allowed staff to dedicate one machine to capturing signature images and the other to sorting envelopes after signature verification.
“I think we had signature verification done for the vast majority of the ballots that we received last week, which is a lot faster than we’ve done in the past,” Casparis said.
The Sacramento County office also increased the size of the team tasked with signature verification.
“That’s typically where the bottleneck has been, because every single ballot has two sets of eyes on it,” Casparis said.
The next step is what elections office staff call “processing,” which involves opening each envelope and inspecting ballots for tears, rips, stains or anything else that could interfere with tabulating votes.
In the past, elections office staff extracted ballots from envelopes using a machine, which occasionally cut into ballots and required them to be duplicated because the damage would interfere with tabulation. This year, staff extracted ballots by hand, reducing the number that needed to be duplicated.
“It was all hands on deck,” Casparis said.
“As of (Tuesday), there were 20, maybe 30,000 ballots left to tabulate, but all of those ballots were ready to go through the tabulator,” he said. “I think our deadline for having the rest of the ballots counted is this coming Monday, and we’re easily going to meet that deadline.”
According to Casparis, the operational improvements had been in the works for more than a year, before the Proposition 50 special election in November.
“That was kind of dropped in our lap very last minute,” he said.
Placer’s ‘sign, scan and go’ approach
In Placer County, policy changes helped speed up the process. After Assembly Bill 626 was passed in the California State Assembly in 2023 permitting on-site ballot scanning for California counties, Placer County was one of just a few counties to implement the policy during the 2024 general election.
“We’ve branded it ‘sign, scan, and go,’ just to be as literal as possible,” said Stacy Robinson, a spokesperson for the Placer County Elections Office.
Since then, every vote center in the county has implemented on-site ballot scanning for all elections, including the June 2 primary. Voters can fill out their ballots at home and take them to any vote center as early as 11 days before Election Day.
“They proceed directly to the ballot scanner and then they are able to watch as their ballot is counted in front of them, just as if they were voting in-person and had been issued, you know, a poll ballot,” Robinson said.
Placer County had the highest percentage of in-person voters in the state during the 2024 general election, with 25% of ballots cast in person, according to Robinson. In this year’s primary, the figure dropped to about 10% but still ranked the county first in the state.
Robinson said “sign, scan, and go” has improved ballot-counting efficiency because each ballot cast at a vote center is one less ballot that must undergo signature verification. It also eliminates the possibility of ballots being delayed in the mail.
“We consider it a win-win because it allows us to count those ballots faster and it improves voter confidence and trust in the process, because they’re actually able to watch their ballot counted in real time,” Robinson explained.
The faster turnaround occurred despite a surge in voter turnout on Election Day compared with earlier voting periods, consistent with historical trends, Robinson said. In Placer County, the first 10 days of in-person voting yielded fewer than 11,000 voters. On Election Day, about 18,000 voters cast ballots.
In Sacramento County, Election Day yielded 15,354 in-person votes, with overall turnout exceeding comparable elections in 2018 and 2022.
This story was originally published June 11, 2026 at 12:08 PM with the headline "Ballot counting was faster across Sacramento region this election. What changed?."
