California’s prohibitively expensive recounts are unfair and bad for public trust

Is this a problem or not: Recounts of close elections are now so expensive in California that they are out-of-reach of everyone except the super-rich and well-funded special interests.

The sharp increase in cost results from recent changes to state election law and regulations. In 2019, then-Secretary of State Alex Padilla decertified all the older voting equipment in California and required every county to use systems that count optical scans of mail ballots and encoded data from ballots cast on touchscreen ballot-marking devices.

Previously, ballot cards were marked by voters with ink-a-dot or punch-outs. Those cards were tabulated by machine but were human readable.

Theoretically, it is still possible for humans to count paper ballots, but the cost has become prohibitive. Counties no longer sort the incoming ballots by precinct. Regardless of whether voters return a mail ballot or vote in person, the paper ballots are stored in unsorted “batches.” Good luck if you’d like to see them ever again.

In the November election, two races in Ventura County were razor close. A seat on the Ventura County Community College District board of trustees was decided by 7 votes out of 76,100 tallied. A seat on the Fillmore City Council was decided by 2 votes out of 1,270 counted.

The Ventura County Star reported that the cost of recounting the City Council race was $27,500 for a manual recount of the 1,270 paper ballots. The county offered the less expensive method of recounting the optical scans by viewing them on computer monitors. The cost for that was $23,600.

The requestor of the city council recount declined to go forward with it.

There are no automatic recounts in California, even if an election ends in a tie. Anyone can request a recount, but the requestor must pay the costs of it, upfront, every day.

The cost quoted for recounting 76,100 ballots in the community college race was $61,500. The county estimated that the “prep work,” including locating the ballots from that district among 6,200 “vote batches” from all across the county, would take four to six days and cost $53,600. Then it would cost about $7,900 for one day to count the votes.

The requestor declined to go forward.

This is now typical. The 2022 recount of a mayoral race in Ojai cost $27,700. There were only 3,600 ballots. In 2020, the Long Beach Reform Coalition requested a recount of a ballot measure that extended a city sales tax permanently. There were about 100,000 ballots to recount. The cost of counting optical scans was estimated in the vicinity of $200,000. The LBRC paid for a partial recount of about 7,000 ballots and in the process discovered several instances of variances between what the machine had tallied and what the human eye saw on the ballot. The technology is not perfect.

The state even changed the law to paper over the fact that the longtime vote tally verification method, a manual tally of ballots from 1% of the precincts in an election, is no longer possible because ballots are not sorted or stored by precinct. The new law allows the counties to do a manual tally of “batches.” But precinct vote totals are part of the public record. “Batch” totals are not.

Does any of this matter?

Of course it does. All computer systems are vulnerable to the introduction of malicious code or just plain errors in programming. By making recounts unaffordable, the state of California is sending ordinary voters a clear message: Shut up and trust us.

Only wealthy individuals and special interests can afford to verify vote tallies. That’s what happened in Congressional District 16 in the March 5 “top-two” primary election after two candidates tied for second place. Three candidates would have run in general election, but a then-undisclosed donor (later revealed to be a San Jose tech entrepreneur) paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for a recount, knocking one of the candidates out by a few votes.

All elections matter, whether they are for federal offices or local ones, for initiatives or tax increases or changes to the law.

The legislature should require counties to sort and store ballots by precinct. Trust has to be earned.

Write Susan@SusanShelley.com and follow her on X @Susan_Shelley