Alameda County’s first elections under the leadership of Cynthia Cornejo, the new Registrar of Voters, went “smoothly and efficiently,” according to a new report provided at this month’s elections commission meeting. 

Cornejo, the longtime deputy director under the former registrar, Tim Dupuis, took over this past Spring after years of challenges and problems, such as mishandled ballots and slow vote counts. Dupuis retired this past March after 24 years as the registrar and almost as many years as its top information technology official. 

In a four-page report about the statewide June 2 Primary Election and the June 16 Congressional Primary Election, Cornejo wrote that “trained election workers and effective leadership” enabled her team to implement previously identified improvements to the voting system. 

The biggest improvement, according to the report, appears to have been speeding up the vote counting and results reporting process, including faster signature checking, scanning, and vote extraction. This resulted in “more ballots counted before the first update on Friday” than in previous elections. 

Despite the conservative-led national uproar over the relative slowness of California elections, the registrar said they did not receive “any complaints about result updates being slow” in June. We have submitted a public records request to verify Cornejo’s complaint note. 

The county also improved its transparency processes by installing new digital kiosks at the registrar’s office to make it easier for regular people to observe elections staff as they processed ballots. Cornejo also commended the use of devices known as Poll Pads by poll workers to access real-time encrypted registration data. These devices, largely developed under Dupuis, help voters check in at vote centers and cast their vote-by-mail ballots without the return identification envelope.

Despite these successes, the registrar and her office still identified aspects of the election process that need improvements. 

Some voting centers, for example, were very popular, causing in-person ballot boxes to fill up quickly and requiring poll workers to monitor them until staff picked up ballots. Cornejo also said that some residents were worried that the registrar’s staff picking up those ballots were not wearing county insignia, raising concerns about stolen ballots. These concerns will be addressed before the next election, she pledged. 

More importantly, for an age when hunger for real-time election results is more palpable than ever, the registrar acknowledged that the county website’s messaging on election night can be confusing. For example, the results page often includes the phrase “precincts reported 100%,” which many people wrongly interpret to mean that all of the ballots have been counted. 

“During the vote counting, starting on election night, the ‘100%’ reported notation incorrectly conveys that 100 percent of all the votes have been received or counted,” she wrote. “Changing the preliminary results to say *precincts partially reporting* without a percentage is necessary to avoid faulty assumptions.”

Another change, based on feedback from county voters, is to have election information guides provide clearer language about the differences between state and county elections and to include a table of contents in the county guide to make the dense booklet easier to navigate. 

The registrar told the commission that she would update them on any significant changes, if there were any, ahead of the fall elections.