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With the Nov. 4 special election on the horizon, best practices for voting can seem opaque, especially to first-time voters. Although the official registration deadline closed on Oct. 20, there’s still time to register and get your vote in.

“You would just need to either visit our office down in South Sacramento or one of the vote centers when they open on Oct. 25 or Nov. 1,” said Ken Casparis, Sacramento County’s voter registration spokesperson. “You essentially just register to vote that day, cast your ballot that day, and your ballot comes back to us the way it normally would.”

However, if you already have a ballot sitting in your mailbox or on your kitchen counter, you may not want to wait to send it in or find a dropbox. The earlier a voter sends a ballot in, the more time they have to correct any issues that may arise with their ballot. 

Kim Alexander, president of the California Voter Foundation, talked about the most common ways mail-in ballots get rejected and if they can be corrected.

“We can protect ballots from being rejected if there's a signature problem, but we can't do anything about a ballot that arrives too late to be counted,” Alexander said. “ Fill it out, send it in, drop it in your mailbox. There's really no reason to delay. Get it done.”

Issues typically arise with signatures that don't match what they have on file, Alexander said, usually the voter’s driver’s license signature. 

“If there is an issue with your signature, it gives your elections office and you time to deal with it before election day,” Alexander said. “But sadly, a lot of voters lose their interest in curing their ballots after election day.”

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“The number of cases where somebody has actually voted somebody else's ballot in our state is in the single digits,” Alexander said. “So, when it happens, it does get discovered and people are prosecuted for it.”

If you prefer voting in-person, or are worried about your mail-in ballot reaching the USPS hub on time, you can find your nearest polling site on the Secretary of State website. 

“The main thing we want people to do is to make sure they've got a plan for when and how and where they're going to do it,” Alexander said, “And get it done sooner rather than later if they can.“ (Full Story)