Counting mail-in ballots can be painfully slow — and Mickey Mouse voters are partly to blame

Did you vote for Mickey Mouse?

How about your dog, or yourself, or some hot celebrity?

Or maybe you wrote in “none of the above”?

If so, we’re going to hit you with an uncomfortable truth: You are part of the reason it’s taking so frustratingly long to get the final results of last week’s San Luis Obispo County primary election.

That’s because every single ballot with a write-in vote must be adjudicated by an election worker to determine whether the name appears on the secretary of state’s list of official write-in candidates.

“I don’t think voters realize the amount of time we have to take in order to look at every single write-in,” San Luis Obispo County Clerk-Recorder Elaina Cano said. “That is a huge chunk of adjudication. If they (voters) would not fill in that (write-in) bubble, counting would go a lot quicker.”

While it may feel satisfying in the moment to register your disgust with the choices on the ballot by writing in a prank candidate, it causes a hiccup in the process. And while one hiccup isn’t a big deal, they can add up.

Write-in votes aren’t the only issue.

Failing to completely fill in the bubbles also means it takes longer to process your ballot. Same goes for using red ink — or purple, green or pink — instead of blue or black.

Another thing: While it’s perfectly OK to wait until election day to mail in your ballot or place it in a drop-off box, a last-minute deluge of ballots like we saw in this election translates into a longer wait for the final results.

Ballots dropped off in the days leading up to the election can be processed ahead of time, though the results cannot be published until after the polls close on Election Day.

If there aren’t many ballots to process in advance, it means there is a whole lot of work to be done after election day. That’s especially true with this election, since there are two ballot sheets to process, rather than the usual one.

All of these factors combine to leave us playing a painfully long waiting game.

As of late Tuesday, roughly 60% of ballots had been counted, but that still leaves enough outstanding ballots to affect the outcome in the District 2 and District 4 Board of Supervisors races.

The winners of those races may not be apparent until late next week, and as hard as that is on us, think of the candidates and their families.

It didn’t use to be like this.

Back in the day when more of us went to the polls to cast our ballots, we could generally count on getting a good read on the outcome on election night.

But as in-person voting has become less and less prevalent — fewer than 3% of SLO County voters went to their polling places this time — we’ve had to wait longer for results, since tabulating those mail-in ballots takes considerably more time than counting traditional ballots.

More staff and more vote-processing equipment could speed things up, but there’s a fundamental issue preventing that: There’s not enough space at the SLO County Clerk-Recorder’s Office in the County Government Center, which was designed at a time when voting was still done the old-school way.

At least for now, we’ll have to manage our expectations and accept the fact that, for some races, it may take days or even weeks to learn the outcome.

Still, we’re not completely powerless here.

We can do our part to make the process run as smoothly as possible by using black or blue ink, fully filling in those bubbles — and resisting the temptation to vote for Mickey Mouse.

This story was originally published June 16, 2022 at 5:30 AM.