Excerpt:

Neighborhood polling places are history in five California counties: Sacramento, Nevada, Napa, San Mateo and Madera.

They are being replaced by one-stop vote centers, drop boxes and voting by mail. The changes are part of the Voters Choice Act, designed to give Californians more choices on how they can vote. 

At the Sacramento County Elections office, hundreds of ballots are arriving each day. 

“We’ve received nearly 8,000 vote-by-mail ballots voted and back in house,” said Alice Jarboe, interim Registrar of Voters for Sacramento County. “And that’s a record for this time period prior to any election that I’ve been involved with in the past 20 years."

It appears there’s a surge in voter turnout at a time when Sacramento County is going through some big changes. 

Kim Alexander is president of the California Voter Foundation and actively monitoring the June primary election and its vote-by-mail component. She said voters must sign their ballots or they won’t be counted. 

“One of the things we’re going to be watching for is the vote-by-mail rejection ballot issue, which is when people who send in their vote-by-mail ballots make a mistake -- or forget to sign -- or their signature doesn’t match adequately with their signature on file, and their ballots are rejected,” Alexander said. (full story)