More Days, More Ways to Vote

Gail Pellerin, Santa Cruz County Clerk. Oct. 2020. Photo by Shmuel Thaler. 

An Interview with Santa Cruz County Clerk Gail Pellerin, 

On the Eve of 2020 Election Results

It's a very close election. Today is Wednesday, November 4, and I know you were up really late last night counting votes because I was here with you! Let’s get right to it. How difficult is it to secure the votes in an election? 

It varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. I can speak to California, where we have a very secure system. We are a state that is an enfranchisement state. We want people to have access to voting. We don’t put up a lot of barriers. We have same-day voter registration, so they can still register and vote if people miss the deadline. We have provisional voting for people whose signature doesn't match their vote-by-mail ballot. We have a seventeen-day postmark period, so if a voter mailed their ballot on or before November 3 and it gets to us by November 20, we can still count it. It gives the post office seventeen days on the back end to deliver the ballot. 

California does a lot to make sure voters succeed. We don’t set you up for failure. There’s one state, I can’t remember which one, that allows a voter to request a vote-by-mail ballot the Monday before the Tuesday election. That just sets a voter up for failure because there's no way you can do that in time to get your vote counted. And some states require your signature to be notarized, which is, again, crazy. It’s a big step a voter has to take to get their ballot to count. California has removed all of that. 

And also, due to the Pandemic, California decided to mail ballots to all voters. Our voters didn’t even have to request a ballot; it automatically showed up in their mailbox. And for all the people who did not get their ballot, we had in-person voting opportunities. 

We know our voters for Santa Cruz County, so we moved ahead to a “vote center model.” Any voter can go to any location to vote. We had nineteen locations plus the Vote Mobile. You could go to any. We started voting on October 5, and we added the vote mobile on October 12. We call it “more days, more ways to vote” to make sure people have access.

I love the idea of a Vote Mobile. It’s especially nice at the beach! Where did the Vote Mobile go to reach voters?

West Cliff was the first place we were, by the Lighthouse. The first day we launched it, I wanted to do Santa Cruz and South County. So after West Cliff, we went to Watsonville by Civic Plaza.  After that, we started working with places, such as residential care facilities, where people might have been sheltering in place and unable to leave their homes. We also went out to the Homeless Shelter and were parked out there one day. We also wanted to hit the areas ravaged by the fire (CZU Fire), so we went out to San Lorenzo Valley, Davenport, up to the Summit. We wanted to offer easy access to voting in areas where we could not have a facility. We ended up going to about thirty locations with the Vote Mobile.

Vote Mobile at the Santa Cruz Lighthouse. Oct. 2020. Photo by Shmuel Thaler. 

Things are relatively calm today in the San Francisco Bay Area, where Joe Biden won by a landslide last night. What do you think the County Clerks are doing right now in states like Nevada and Pennsylvania, where it is extremely close?

They are being very careful right now. They are auditing for everything. I hope they are counting all the votes that were cast legally and cast by voters who are eligible to vote. I hope they all have a paper record of those votes, and I hope they are doing their due diligence to check to make sure that everything is done correctly. 

But I also, California, has this great code that you opt-in in favor of the voter. There are some people, it’s amazing to me, but there are some people that get joy in basically disqualifying a ballot. I would hope that election officials don’t feel that way. I would hope that they really look for, “How can I count this ballot?” versus “How can I disqualify the ballot?”

 You want to be looking for ways, look, you don’t want it to be a test, voting should not be a penmanship test. It shouldn’t be a test of access to a notary. It shouldn’t be a test of having to drive an unmanageable distance. It should be simple and easy and accessible, yet safe and secure. So I just hope they are doing their due diligence. When we have close contests, we will escalate our manual recount and recount all the ballots as needed. Because there's a piece of paper and a writing device, and people do funky things (laughter).  

What kind of role did the Coronavirus Pandemic play in this election in the San Francisco Bay Area?

It was a struggle. It was an extraordinary condition to have to conduct an election. We worked with our Secretary of State. They did a lot of mass orders of hand sanitizer and disinfectant, wipes, face shields.  We did a statewide order and got a lot of the PPE. We worked together to make sure everyone was protected. There are some states where fear of getting Covid was not a legitimate excuse to get a ballot mailed to them. It’s absurd. I think eight states were in that category. It’s a Global Pandemic; it’s not something just isolated to one place. It’s these super spreader events that keep causing us to get more people sick, in the hospital, and dying. We had to have a lot of expertise to create a safe election. My job is to count votes accurately, but I’ve had to do a lot more over the years. I’ve had to become an expert on social media and manage a website, and there are many things added to my list of duties. And this year, it was the public health and safety manager, which was stressful. We had one case at one precinct where somebody had been diagnosed a couple of weeks ago, which scared some people. I know San Joaquin County had somebody contract the virus and had to shut down the facility. This is real. We are not protected from Covid even when we are exercising our right to vote. 

Did you, at any point, consider Drive-Through Voting, as they did in Houston?

We had all the equipment reserved and ready to go if we had to go that route. We had generators prepared to go if we had to move to the parking lot of our facilities. For example, if we could not go into Temple Beth El, we were prepared to vote in the Temple Beth El parking lot. 

It’s a very big night tonight. The world is on edge. Do you want to make any predictions? 

No, I do not get involved in the political side. It is essential and, most importantly, to count all the votes and honor the results. 

How did you finish things last night when I left you at midnight?

I was in bed by 1:15 a.m. I did go home and take a bath! And I did get my shot of tequila and my chocolate. (Laughter) It takes the edge off after a month-long election. For us, November 3 was the last day to vote. But we’ve been voting since October 5, and it feels like that Groundhog Day movie. I feel like every day I woke up, and it was like, “It’s Election Day!!” (Laughter)  More days and more ways for voters translates to many days, mostly bad nutrition for me. 

Thank you, Gail! And good job Emily, leaving your mom out her chocolate and tequila!

—Kimberly Wainscoat

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