Inside the recount: Election workers examine every vote in District 16 race

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Inside a room off Tower Road in San Mateo, a dozen election workers wearing blue latex gloves transport and sort ballots with an air of quiet efficiency on Tuesday afternoon, getting them ready for the scanning machine.

They are pulling them from the white baskets that are marked with precinct numbers. Later in the day, the ballots would be scanned and added to the tally of results compiled by the San Mateo County Registration and Elections Division, which is now in the final phase of a recount that could determine Silicon Valley’s next representative in Congress.

The county is processing about 40,000 ballots as part of the operation, which was initially planned to be a manual recount but then changed to a machine recount at the request of Jonathan Padilla, an ally of former San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo.

Padilla’s team is also paying $12,000 per day for the operation, which will determine whom Liccardo will face in the November election for the 16^th District seat. The official election results after the March 5 primary showed Liccardo comfortably in first place with 38,489 votes, while Santa Clara County Supervisor Joe Simitian and state Assembly member Evan Low finished tied for second place with 30,249 votes each, setting the stage for a three-person contest in November. A swing of a single vote would turn it into a two-person race.

A similar process is unfolding in Santa Clara County, which makes up the greater share of the district, with nearly 144,000 ballots cast for the 10 candidates in the race to succeed U.S. Rep. Anna Eshoo.

While the two counties officially launched the recount on April 15, San Mateo County didn’t begin re-scanning the ballots until four days later, said Jim Irizarry, San Mateo County’s assistant chief elections officer. In the first few days, election workers were pulling ballots out of storage and locating the precincts that needed to be scanned. County officials were planning to have all ballots scanned by machines by April 23, he said.

As of Wednesday morning, the recount did not change any of the results in San Mateo County, according to the results released by the registrar. Santa Clara County, however, saw slight fluctuations in a few precincts. In six Santa Clara County precincts, Simitian saw his tally increase by one vote. Low, meanwhile, saw his tally go up by one in three precincts and by two in a fourth. At the end of the day, Simitian was ahead by one vote.

That, however, was still liable to change as Santa Clara County was completing the machine count and reviewing disputed ballots.

“We are only posting the preliminary results for those that completed all phases of the recount process,” Steve Goltiao, associate communications officer at Santa Clara County Registrar’s Office, told this publication.

Machine scans are only a part of the recount process. The counties are also reviewing “challenged ballots” – those that were not counted during the March 5 primary but that Padilla and his attorneys believe should have been included in the tally. Irizarry said San Mateo County had 28 ballots that the Padilla team had identified as in need of review. By the end of Tuesday, they agreed to formally challenge 16 ballots.

A “challenged ballot” is a bit of a misnomer. As Irizarry noted, it is really a “challenged envelope.” In most cases, the person failed to sign the ballot envelope or to send it on time. His team was preparing to examine each of these ballots in the second half of the week and rule on whether it should be included or not.

“We’ll sit down with staff and review all the nuances of each ballot and we’ll then move forward to making a decision after we do thorough analysis of each ballot,” Irizarry said.

Despite their critical role in the elections process, staff in the Tower Road building are distinctly apolitical. They refrain from talking about the motivations of those who requested the recount or to disclose which campaigns had been sending observers. Irizarry said the people who are performing the recount are, for the most part, temporary employees who get called in to help out during elections.

Some have been helping the county with election work for more than 20 years, he said.

“They’re not with us the whole time but they are the backbone of the election,” he said.

Both counties had to pivot early in the process when Padilla went from requesting a manual recount, which takes longer and costs more, to a machine count, which requires more time to stage but is relatively efficient once the ballots are prepared for scanning. A machine can process about 10,000 ballots per day, Irizarry said.

Another task ahead of the election workers is adjudication. Unlike challenged ballots, which focus on envelopes, adjudication pertains to actual ballots. While only the requester – in this case, Padilla or his representative — can challenge a ballot, anyone can request an adjudication. The process is relatively rare (San Mateo County only has about five adjudicated ballots) and usually involves ballots that are partially filled out or that have unusual markings on them.

County staff plan to complete the adjudications by the end of the week.

“The point is to determine the voter intent,” Irizarry said.

For elections officials, exceptional ballots are very much the rule. While the overwhelming majority of ballots get counted with no issues, every election involves hundreds of ballots that don’t get counted for one reason or another. In San Mateo County, 516 ballots came in too late and 51 had signatures that did not match the one on file, Irizarry said. Another 12 had no signatures at all.

The county also had four ballots that weren’t counted due to ID requirements, four others that were empty envelopes and two that were returned by a family member with a note signifying that the individual is deceased, Irizarry said.

This universe of possible irregularities creates a fertile ground for those looking to challenge the ballot count. Padilla has not been shy about accusing the county of failing to count eligible votes. In an April 18 statement, Padilla claimed that his team had uncovered 20 ballots that were “improperly excluded from the count” and suggested that in the days ahead it could find “hundreds of improperly excluded ballots that weren’t counted.”

He also complained about San Mateo County’s decision to raise the recount costs from $5,000 to $12,000 and called the move a “bait-and-switch.”

“So even though San Mateo County only has 20% of the votes in the district, they are now charging us the same amount of money as Santa Clara County, which has 80% of the votes,” Padilla wrote. “How does this make sense? There’s now a danger that San Mateo’s bait-and-switch cost increases will prevent legal, improperly-excluded votes we’ve discovered from being counted.”

Liccardo’s opponents have their own questions about recount funds. On April 9, the same day that Padilla’s attorneys requested a recount, the firm with which they are affiliated formed a Super PAC called “Count the Vote.” Eshoo, who had endorsed Simitian in the race to succeed her, put out a public statement on X on April 19 demanding to know who is funding the committee and, by extension, the recount.

“Without full transparency, a dark shadow is cast across the landscape of this all-important election,” Eshoo said in a statement. “The voters deserve to know who and how much. And should not have to wait for a mid-July report.”

Padilla responded to Eshoo by saying the donors will be “fully disclosed in keeping with the compliance rules that Congress and you have set.” Which is to say, by the July 15 deadline.

Low also took a shot at Padilla, who formally filed the request on Low’s behalf. Days after the recount request, Low accused Liccardo of “hiding behind his former staff and donor.”

“I have not called for a recount and I oppose one,” Low wrote on X. “Stating that it is on my behalf is disingenuous. We still don’t know who is paying for it.”

Simitian, for his part, has largely stayed out of the fray. He called the recount “yet another hill to climb” but said he is reassured by the democratic process.

“My thanks to employees working at the Registrar of Voters and to our volunteers who are monitoring the recount,” Simitian said in an April 15 statement. “Eventually, this process will work itself out. Meanwhile, my job is to stay focused on how I can best represent the folks in our district. And that’s what I’m doing.”