Nov. 26—The Kern County Board of Supervisors will hear Tuesday a public presentation by its Elections Division on $2.7 million in improvements made ahead of the March 2024 primary season.
This comes months after the money for upgrades and hiring was approved by supervisors as part of the 2023-24 county budget. Election staff have since made several changes, from increasing staffing to upgrading equipment.
These changes include hiring four additional people: an assistant registrar of voters, a departmental public information officer, an administrative coordinator and a senior accountant.
Historically, such as last winter, the department had to pool staff from associated offices, such as the auditor-controller’s office, to meet elections results reporting deadlines set by the state.
The department, according to Registrar of Voters Aimee Espinoza, had eight vacancies during the midterm election cycle, which contributed to a delay in counting votes. Despite the four new staff members, officials expect to outsource help once again, due to “seasonality and fluctuations in election activities.”
“To achieve efficiencies and limit costs, it has been necessary to borrow staff from other functions in the Auditor-Controller and County Clerk divisions to focus on election activities on and around Election Day, as needed,” a county report read.
Additionally, the division purchased various equipment, from $80,000 in new computers and $10,000 ballot press machines to a new website and $528,843 for a new sorter to reduce the time it takes to count vote-by-mail ballots.
Espinoza believes this second sorter will result in a faster count of vote-by-mail ballots, a popular but timely voting process that since 2020 has been provided to every registered voter in California.
The county also approved $1 million for various security improvements, including monitoring access to sensitive areas, and security cameras positioned over the county’s ballot drop boxes.
Since each type of ballot — mail-in, provisional, in-person, dropbox ballots — has to be run separately to report numbers to the California Secretary of State, a second sorter will speed up the process.
Some upgrades were tested in June as part of a mock election.
Election security has come under question since the 2020 presidential contest, when then-President Donald Trump claimed the election had been rigged in favor of his opponent, now-President Joe Biden.
These accusations, following investigations and subsequent denouncements, were ultimately found untrue, and are now the source of several lawsuits against the former president and current front-runner for the Republican Party.
Criticism has extended to Kern, ramping up during the 2022 midterm election for the state Senate’s 16th District race between David Shepard, R-Porterville, and Melissa Hurtado, D-Sanger.
Shepard ultimately conceded in January, after losing to Hurtado by 13 votes following a two-month recount process that resulted in a change of one vote.
While no claims of fraud were substantiated and several recounts verified the results, a few residents routinely raised questions at Board of Supervisors meetings.
Frustrations boiled over, and spilled over into many of the board’s decisions, such as the approval of a three-year contract with Dominion Voting Systems during the summer that followed three months of debate amid claims of voter fraud. Kern has used Dominion machines since 2016.
Espinoza, who took over the Elections Division at the start of the year, has flatly said in past meetings she found no evidence of fraud within Kern elections or with Dominion Voting Systems.
The improvements, instead, are more a gesture of good faith, to air out suspicions of voter malfeasance and rebuild trust between local governance and the community, issues on which she has said she campaigned.