Excerpt:

Leading up to Tuesday’s trip to the polls, there was a lot of fear on both sides of the recall issue about whether or not voters really understood the choice they were being asked to make.

President and founder of the California Voter Foundation, Kim Alexander, spoke with FOX40 weeks before the election and shared concerns that voters may be confused by all the different ballot layouts.

Alexander joined FOX40’s Sonseeharay Tonsall following Gov. Gavin Newsom’s defeat of the recall effort about the biggest lessons learned from this election.

“We had 3,200 voting sites across the state operating in California,” Alexander said. “And really, I can count in single digits the number of incidents that I heard about. And I think that the lesson I took away from that is by mailing everybody a ballot and giving them plenty of time to turn it in by mail or at drop-off locations prior to election day we really preload the voting process to alleviate pressure on voting sites on election day.”

Excerpts:

CLAIM: Officials counted “9 million mail in ballots” in an hour in the California gubernatorial recall election, whereas it took some states weeks to tabulate results in the 2020 presidential election.

AP’S ASSESSMENT: Missing context. California’s recall election results were tabulated quickly in part because election officials were able to process mail-in ballots prior to Election Day. While The Associated Press and others have called the election, official counting continues.

THE FACTS: The AP declared Tuesday night that Gov. Gavin Newsom had defeated a GOP-led recall effort, based on the initial results of votes cast. In a tweet shared on Instagram, a conservative writer questioned the state’s quick tabulation of millions of votes, suggesting something was suspicious.

(online at https://www.sacbee.com/opinion/op-ed/article254235563.html, photo credit Lezlie Sterling, Sacramento Bee)

There is a growing chorus claiming that California’s recall election is not secure.

Some claims come from people providing no evidence to back them up and no substantiation of fraud. Some come from people who question aspects of California’s election administration practices that they don’t understand (like the use of accessibility holes by some counties in ballot return envelopes to help guide low-vision voters to the signature box).

Excerpt:

The eyes of the nation will be on California this week as voters decide whether to retain or remove Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom in Tuesday’s recall election.

But once the final ballots are mailed, dropped off or cast in-person, many will ask: ‘How soon will the results come in?’ And ‘when will we know the outcome?’

Election experts say it’s impossible to predict exactly when the race will be decided. If it’s a landslide, we might know within hours of polls closing. But a close contest could mean weeks of hand-wringing as late arriving mail ballots are counted before a winner is declared. 

“If it’s very close,” said Kim Alexander, president of the California Voter Foundation, “then you’re going to have to wait possibly all the way until the end of the certification period which is 30 days after election day.”