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Californians faced the naysayers and voted by mail in record numbers this election, potentially avoiding a pandemic super spreader event and showing the nation it could be done.

CalMatters interviewed voting officials in most of the state’s 58 counties and their verdict is in: The experiment with voting by mail saw few glitches, little drama and, instead, might well provide a blueprint for future elections across the country.

Indeed, state officials are already talking about plans to make voting by mail permanent for the biggest state in the union and its 22 million registered voters.

Besides the unprecedented challenge of conducting the election in a pandemic, voting officials also had to deal with a deep, partisan divide that helped to fuel widespread misinformation about election security.

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Election officials across California are breathing a sigh of relief: An election that combined unprecedented changes and unmatched scrutiny amid a global pandemic resulted in historic levels of participation and few widespread issues.

Some features of this year's vote will hopefully go down as historical aberrations, like poll workers in protective gear and masked voters physically distanced in voting locations stocked with hand sanitizer.

Other alterations brought on by the coronavirus — such as the expansion of voting by mail and the shift away from assigned polling places — could spur long lasting changes to the way in which Californians cast their ballots.

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With election results in so some states still too close to call, voters may need no greater lesson to teach them that every single vote really does matter.
 
That’s the message Kim Alexander of the California Voter Foundation has been trying to convince people of for years, while working on our election systems to make clear votes possible.

“I’m really satisfied with the careful work that elections officials are conducting right now in counting the ballots,” Alexander told FOX40. “A number of the counties are allowing you to watch this process yourself on live webcams, so I think that gives a good degree of transparency.”
 
With mail-in ballots becoming a tide-turner in many battleground states, Alexander warned that votes can get thrown out because people forget to sign their ballots or their signature doesn’t match their registration. 

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In an election where margins are razor thin, Nevada could play a pivotal role in deciding who will be president of the United States. But observers warn that many mail-in ballots could be left out of the final count. 

According to Heather Carmen, Assistant Registrar of Voters for Washoe County, ballots are most often challenged by officials when the voter’s signature doesn’t match the one on file — or if the ballot was never signed to begin with.

Carmen says if that happens, voters have until Nov. 12 to fix the problem.

“If there is a signature issue, we’ve challenged it for either missing a signature or miscompares,” she explained, “We will send them a letter with three different options on how to, what we call ‘cure’ it.”