The Official Canvass is required for certification of the results. By law, the canvass must start on the Thursday following the election and must be completed no later than 31 days afterward (well, effectively 30 days or 28 days when we’re conducting presidential primaries).

The process is, in a nutshell, an accounting of everything that went on during the voting period. We make sure, for example, that all supplies and ballots that were processed at vote centers are accounted for. We check the rosters that people sign at voting locations to make sure that they balance with what we have recorded in the voting history for the election. And we also conduct a two part manual tally of one percent of precincts. 

The one percent manual tally, which is a post-election audit of the voting equipment and open to the public, starts with a random draw of precincts. We continue to draw precincts until all contests on every ballot are covered. We then randomly draw batches of voted ballots until we reach at least one percent of the precincts on our list. The elections official has the option to draw greater than one percent. For instance, we drew more than one precinct for Measure B, since the contest was very close. We undergo this process for both vote-by-mail ballots and for ballots cast in person–that’s what makes it a two part manual tally. Once we locate the batches of ballots to be included in the tally, teams of four count these batches manually and compare their results to the machine counts. For this election, two teams of four manually audited 515 ballots. By the end of the audit, there were no discrepancies between the manual count and the machine count.

During the canvass, we also continue to count ballots that we couldn’t get to on Election Day and that come in post election. At least once a week , we must report the number of unprocessed ballots that are left to count. In Nevada County, there was a surge of ballots that arrived on March 5, mostly by mail or drop box. We counted approximately 17,000 ballots between our final report on Election Night and the time we certified the election on March 27–that’s almost double of what we counted by Election Night. Most of those ballots were dropped off in a drop box or delivered by the US Postal Service on Election Day. Thanks to our new mail sorting machine, that process went quickly.

Once everything is counted, our office has a rigorous reporting schedule to deliver to the California Secretary of State. We certify that we met our voter list maintenance obligations, that we conducted a one percent tally, and report other routine administrative matters. We also complete the Statement of Vote and Supplemental Statement of Vote. Finally, we bring all our work to the County Board of Supervisors so that they may formally accept the certified election results.

Did You Know?

Some of the ballots that we counted came in after the election but were considered timely. Pursuant to Elections Code Section 3020, we must count any ballot sent through the mail that is postmarked on or before Election Day, as long as the ballot is in our office by close of business by the seventh day after the election. In other words, if a ballot for this election was postmarked by or before March 5, our office would need it in our office no later than March 12. Roughly 2,000 ballots fell into this category for this election. We are also able to accept any ballot that was dropped off in an official dropbox in another county–those ballots must be sent to their home county no later than eight days after the elections official receives it.

We also waited for voters to cure a missing or mismatched signature. Sometimes, people forget to sign the envelope or their signature has changed. Our office notifies them with a letter that we must send within 24 hours and a follow up if we don’t hear from them. We must give voters up to two days before we certify an election to cure that kind of defect. It forces our office to project early on when we might certify. We could wait until the statewide certification date, but since Nevada County finishes earlier than the 31 day deadline, we make a guess based on how long it has taken for us to finish in past elections. Weeks before Election Day, we projected that we would be ready to certify by March 27, which gave our voters until March 25 to get back to us.