California has a way for you to track your ballot after you vote. Here’s how it works.
BAKERSFIELD, Calif. (KGET) — The state of California offers a way for voters to track their vote-by-mail ballot after they drop it into a drop box or mail it back through the Postal Service.
Every registered voter in California will receive a vote-by-mail ballot. Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a law in 2021, making the practice permanent amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
After you fill out your ballot and put it in the mail or in a designated ballot drop box, the State of California provides a way for you track your ballot as it is received and officially processed and counted.
The service is called Where’s My Ballot from BallotTrax. You can sign up to receive notifications for when your ballot is mailed to you, when it’s received and when it’s counted.
Why did the California Secretary of State do this?
The Secretary of State began offering this service in February 2020 as a form of transparency for voters to learn about the status of their vote-by-mail ballot.
OK, how do I start tracking my ballot?
Click or tap the link to sign up for California’s Where’s My Ballot? service.
The site will ask you to enter your first name, last name, date of birth and ZIP code you used for your voter registration. Once signed in, you can opt-in to receive either email, text, or call notifications about the status of your ballot.
You can also set times for when Where’s My Ballot can send you notifications. You can also select a language for the notification messages.
What do you mean “track my ballot?” Isn’t my vote confidential?
BallotTrax and elections officials say the way Where’s My Ballot? tracks your ballot is through the envelope it’s mailed in. It doesn’t track your vote, who or what you vote for, or your voting history.
In BallotTrax’s FAQ, the company says it has years of experience providing these tracking services to elections offices across the U.S. and works with ballot printing vendors and the U.S. Postal Service to track the envelopes as they go through the mail sorting process.
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When will I get notifications about my ballot?
You’ll have to give it time. If you mailed your ballot, you should allow for five to seven business days for the U.S. Postal Service to deliver it back to the county elections office.
If you put your ballot into a drop box, you will get notifications after county elections workers collect them from the box, but that may take a while depending on how many ballots they have to process. Elections offices have to process hundreds or thousands of ballots depending on how many properly completed ballots are mailed back, turned in to the elections office, or dropped into one of 19 ballot drop boxes in Kern County.
In all, you’ll get four notifications from Where’s My Ballot?:
Ballot Outbound – When your ballot is mailed to you
Ballot Inbound – When you mail back your ballot to the elections office
Ballot Received – When your ballot is received at the elections office
Ballot Accepted – When your ballot is processed and counted
For more information, visit the Secretary of State’s website for vote-by-mail.
For an FAQ from BallotTrax, click here.
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