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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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Of all the societal changes brought by the novel coronavirus, the one that lasts the longest might be the one we just went through: Everyone voting by mail.

Already the method preferred by more three-fourths of San Diego County’s voters, its apparent success in the just-concluded election has some officials talking openly about making it permanent.

“Whether it’s enacted statewide by the legislature, or whether we adopt it on a county level with some tweaks, I think it’s here to stay,” said Nathan Fletcher, a county supervisor. “We should be doing everything we can to make it possible for valid votes to be counted.”

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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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Los Angeles County voters have done their job. They voted.

But this election won’t really be over until Nov. 30. That’s when the registrar-recorder’s office will deem it “certified.”

Until then, at a giant processing hall at the Fairplex in Pomona, at a tally center in Downey and at election headquarters in Norwalk, a bustling fusion of county staff and temporary workers will continue checking, processing and tabulating nearly 800,000 remaining ballots. And candidates in tight races will have to settle for intermittent updates.

Here’s what you can expect from the L.A. County Registrar of Voters over the next few days in the ongoing effort to finish counting the votes from the general election.

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