For most voters, the November 2026 midterm elections are over.
But for those who work at the Contra Costa County Elections Department in downtown Martinez there is still plenty of work to do.
As of Wednesday morning, the department’s 30 permanent employees and 120 seasonal workers hired to help with the election — plus 1,100 volunteers at 150 polling places — had processed ballots submitted by 280,000 Contra Costa voters, representing a 38% turnout of the total electorate.
About 240,000 of those voters submitted their ballots by mail, through the U.S. Post Office, or via one of the 43 election drop boxes scattered across the county. About 40,000 voted in person.
Processing all those ballots is a daunting process, workers told Richmondside during a Tuesday tour of the process.
“It’s really an arduous process, but we make sure the process is safe and secure,” said Contra Costa County Clerk-Recorder Kristin Connelly, an elected official who oversees the department. “People can have a lot of faith in what we do.”
The work began weeks ago as the first mail-in ballots began to arrive. It will continue in the coming days as department employees are required by law to process any ballots postmarked by Nov. 3 that they receive within seven days of the election. The initial election results were filed just after midnight Wednesday, and another count is expected to be posted by 5 p.m. Friday.
After that, department workers spend several weeks validating the results. One way they do that is by holding a public drawing the day after the election to select the precincts that will be manually counted. After each election, 1% of the ballots cast are selected at random, counted by hand, and compared to the count produced by the scanners to verify that the votes were tabulated correctly. (The 1% manual tally can be observed by the public. For more information, call 925-335-7800.)
The department has until Dec. 3 to certify the election.
A six-stop tour of the elections department
Election Day is the busiest for the department as it follows a six-step procedure with a lot of eyes — and machines — on all of those ballots.
The first stop is the Election Operations Center, a garage-like first-floor facility a block from the election headquarters.
It is here where trucks pull up to deliver containers of ballots that have been retrieved from full ballot boxes at polling places and drop-off locations.
Those ballots are separated into trays. Yellow for the envelopes from drop boxes. Green for ballots from polling places. And a separate slot for the ones delivered by mail.
“Everything is color-coded,” said Joel Toscano, an election outreach specialist who conducted the tour. “It’s kind of amazing how everything is so organized.”
Employees run the mail-in ballot envelopes through a machine that checks to make sure the envelopes aren’t damaged and there is a signature on the back. A photo of every envelope is taken by computer.
“The signature is the most important thing that’s checked,” said Toscano.
Envelopes without signatures are set aside. Those voters are then contacted by phone, email and/or a letter to confirm that they submitted a ballot.
The unopened envelopes are then put back into their colored trays and sent to an upstairs room at elections headquarters.
At the second stop, employees in a secure room validate the signatures on all of the 240,000 mailed-in envelopes. You can watch the signatures pop up on monitors for a few seconds while they are scanned and verified by comparing them to past ballots on file or other official records such as a driver’s license.
“On every single envelope, we look at the signatures,” noted Dawn Kruger, the election department’s community and media coordinator.
The verified envelopes are then taken back to the operations center where the third step happens.
That’s when department employees send the sealed envelopes back through machines to be opened. The machine cuts a slit in the top of each one.
“The envelopes are just opened. Nothing else,” Toscano said.
The envelopes, with the ballots still inside, are then driven to a rented gym space near the Amtrak station for the fourth step.
It is here where employees sitting at tables work in pairs taking the ballots out of the envelopes. The ballots are put in one set of brown boxes while the envelopes are put in another set of brown boxes, which are then sealed. Both the ballots and envelopes are stored at the Elections Department for 22 months, in accordance with federal law.
Department employees say this is the room where the anonymity of voters’ ballots is put into action.
“This is where the ballot becomes blind, so to speak,” said Jacob Stull, an election services supervisor.
“This is where the anonymity of every vote is secured,” added Connelly.
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“It is our job to capture the will of the governed.”
— Contra Costa Clerk-Recorder Kristin Connelly
She noted that this secure process makes it impossible to go back to try to verify a voter’s choice on their ballot, as was suggested by the U.S. Department of Justice in the Alaska Senate election.
Stull pointed out that the workers in this room are required to take an oath every morning in which they pledge to uphold the U.S. Constitution as well as all election laws.
From here, the boxes of ballots are driven back to election headquarters for the fifth step.
In another secure upstairs room, election workers remove the ballots from the boxes and place them into scanners. The information from the ballots is stored digitally, but the votes aren’t tabulated until the polls close at 8 p.m.
On Election Day, several outside observers could be seen watching the process. Any member of the public can sign up to be an observer. They are allowed to watch all aspects of the electoral process as long as they don’t interfere and they respect voter privacy.
Any ballots that have issues, such as ovals that aren’t filled in properly, are taken to an adjacent room for the sixth and final step.
This is where adjudicators examine the ballot to see if it can be validated or whether it needs to be discarded.
Toscano said the verification of ballots is an amazing process that he thinks all voters should see in person.
“I love showing this to people to make sure they understand the process,” he said.
Connelly agrees.
“There is such a focus on the job at hand,” she said.
Sometimes outside forces add stress to the elections process
Connelly does worry that allegations of “rigged” and “fake” elections are discouraging to some of her department’s employees. She said there would be a “loss of great wisdom” if they were to leave, so she has held numerous meetings with her employees to give them pep talks.
This season was also tense when Connelly and the county’s lawyers had to go on the offensive after they were among dozens of clerk-recorder offices statewide that the Department of Justice tried to force to verify the citizenship eligibility of 20,000 ballots, more than 400 of which were in Contra Costa County.
Mistakes do happen, as was the case Tuesday after 149 voters in San Pablo received ballots without the city council race and a couple other local ones. Police officers were going door-to-door to encourage voters to visit the polls to rectify the error.
But Connelly said her employees work hard to make sure every vote that is cast is counted.
“It is our job to capture the will of the governed,” she said.
