Placer County changes voting system from polling places to vote centers, ballot drop-off boxes

The Placer County Board of Supervisors voted unanimously Tuesday to do away with traditional polling centers and make it easier to vote by mail and vote in person at county voting centers.

All five supervisors voted to implement provisions of the Voter’s Choice Act, joining 27 other counties across the state that have made the switch since Gov. Jerry Brown signed the VCA in 2016.

Under the VCA, counties must open one voting center for every 10,000 voters — which means 30 voting centers for Placer’s 282,285 voters. The VCA also requires that all registered voters receive a mail-in ballot, and requires that counties provide drop-off boxes 29 days before the election.

It’s a more efficient system as voting patterns have changed in recent years, Placer County Clerk-Recorder-Registrar of Voters, Ryan Ronco, told the Board on Tuesday.

Placer County has historically provided between 150-250 polling places each election. This has meant having to hire anywhere between 800-1,500 temporary workers and election volunteers.

“Unfortunately it’s becoming increasingly difficult to find that number of volunteers,” said Ronco. “Let along convince 250 polling places to open up to us.”

With the 30 voting centers under the VCA, Ronco estimated that the elections office will only need 300-400 temporary staff and volunteers. (Constituents can also vote at any county voting center, whereas before they could only cast a vote at their local polling place.)

On top of the logistical difficulties with traditional polling places, Ronco also told the Board that fewer and fewer voters are choosing to cast their ballots in person, and instead favor the vote-by-mail method. Fewer than 9% of ballots cast in the general election last November were cast in person on Election Day. Instead, Placer County voters typically prefer to vote by mail or by dropping off their mail-in ballot.

This can cause a bottleneck in counting ballots, as Placer experienced in last year’s election.

“Speed is desirable, accuracy is non-negotiable,” said Stacey Robinson, Placer County Public Information Assistant, last November about the amount of time it took to count ballots.

Some voters — including those who prefer to vote in-person — have expressed concern about having to drive further than they’re used to to cast their ballots. Ronco assured them that the 2020 general election, which took place under COVID-19 lockdown conditions, “essentially forced us into a VCA-type election,” where there were only 28 polling places and, per Ronco, “absolutely no complaints from voters about travel distance.”

Concerns about fraud and election integrity

Just outside of decidedly blue Sacramento County is its conservative, decidedly red suburban and rural neighbor to the north. Placer County voted by wide margins to elect Donald Trump in both 2016 and 2020; Trump’s loss in 2020, and his assertion that he lost because of voter fraud, elicited severe mistrust in how ballots are cast and the technology used to count them.

Ronco and his team at the elections office have sought to be as transparent as possible by making themselves available to concerned voters who want to check out the machinery. The elections website even includes a separate note about its use of Dominion Voting Systems, which Trump baselessly blamed for interfering with the 2020 election.

“We understand some folks concerns with vendor’s playing a pivotal part in elections,” the Placer County Elections Office note reads.

“For over 20 years Placer County has kept all vendors at arm’s length. We see vendors as a partner but not as the entity that runs elections. In Placer County, Dominion does not program our database, design our ballots, program our voting equipment, count ballots or audit votes in any way.”

Dominion recently settled a lawsuit with Fox News after the conservative outlet promulgated the conspiracy that Dominion tampered with the 2020 election. Fox agreed to pay $787 million to Dominion to resolve the claims.

It’s no surprise that there are concerns in Placer County about doing away with what voters have come to expect on Election Day. One constituent, Dane Thompson of Granite Bay, called into the Tuesday Board meeting to urge the supervisors not to support the transition to VCA.

The VCA is “dramatically making election integrity worse as it obfuscates who voted when and where,” Thompson said. It’s “an election cheater’s dream” that allows for “vote injections” and “enables cheating.”

Supervisors Shanti Landon, District 2, and Cindy Gustafson, District 5, both questioned Ronco about how a switch to VCA may affect potential attempts at voter fraud.

In Ronco’s nearly 30 years as an elections official in the county, he said that there have been just 5 instances of people saying that someone forged their signature on a ballot. (Those ballots are then sent to the District Attorney’s office for investigation.)

“This move to VCA does not open any doors or create any problems that we don’t already deal with,” Ronco told Landon. “The fact of the matter is, fraud occurs. But we are very vigilant, when it comes to fraud.”

The Supervisors overwhelmingly voiced their support for Ronco; each of them doled effusive praise on the veteran elections official who serves as the President of the California Association of County Clerks and Election Officials.

In short: if Ronco trusts it, the Board does, too.

“You’re probably the best Clerk Recorder in the state,” Landon told him.

“We can try this for a couple years if we want to call this an unofficial pilot, and if there’s an increase in fraud or nefarious activity, we can always go back.”