MENDOCINO CO., 11/7/26 — Mendocino County counted 17,607 ballots on election night and posted the results at 11:34 p.m. on Nov. 3. The results page hasn’t changed since.
Another 14,749 ballots are still waiting to be counted. That’s about 46% of the ballots the county has in hand. Katrina Bartolomie, the county’s registrar of voters, said in an email Friday that the next update is due by 5 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 12.
Those ballots will settle some close races. Eric Hart leads Buffey Wright Bourassa by 228 votes for District 3 supervisor, with about 3,400 ballots left in that race. In Ukiah, Mari Rodin leads John Strangio by 14 votes for the last of three city council seats, with about 1,600 ballots left. Fort Bragg’s council race has about 1,100 uncounted ballots left.
Most of the uncounted ballots are mail-in ballots. Of the 14,749, the county got 12,570 mailed ballots by Election Day and 965 since. The other 1,214 are provisional ballots. Voters fill those out at a polling place when, for example, their name isn’t on the voter list there. Under state rules, they count once elections staff confirm the voter is registered and didn’t already vote.
Every active, registered voter in California was sent a ballot in the mail. A ballot postmarked by Election Day still counts if it arrives within seven days. Those ballots can keep coming in through Nov. 10.
Before a mailed-in ballot can be counted, the state says, elections staff must make sure the voter is registered. They compare the signature on the envelope with the one on file. And they make sure the person didn’t vote somewhere else.
In Mendocino County, that work takes several steps, Bartolomie wrote. Staff remove the tabs from the envelopes. They scan the envelopes and upload them to the office’s election management system. They check the signatures by hand. They sort the envelopes and file them by precinct. Then they count them to get the number of ballots left.
“It’s not easy to do this, we take our time and make sure everything is done correctly,” she wrote.
After all that, staff open the envelopes. They started opening them again late Thursday afternoon, she wrote.
Then the paper ballots go through the county’s scanners. The county bought the system, called Verity, from Hart InterCivic in 2019. Bartolomie said she hopes to run ballots through the scanners Saturday or Monday.
The county is also holding 178 ballots until the voter fixes a problem, such as a signature that doesn’t match the one on file or an envelope nobody signed. The county sends those voters a letter and asks them to send back their paperwork as soon as possible.
Every county in California works under the same rules. On Thursday, the secretary of state’s office listed when each of the state’s 58 counties expects to post its next results. Thirty-seven said Friday, Nov. 6, or sooner. Forty-five said Monday, Nov. 9, or sooner. Humboldt County counted 3,900 more ballots and posted them Thursday. Sonoma plans an update Monday, and Lake plans one Tuesday.
Mendocino and Del Norte are the only two counties with more than 1,000 ballots left that don’t plan to post new results until Nov. 12 or later.
Mendocino has counted about 54% of the ballots it has in hand. That’s more than Humboldt and Sonoma, which have each counted about 51%. Statewide, counties have counted about 65%.
Bartolomie was asked what it would take for the county to post results more often. She said other counties use a machine to check signatures. “Mendocino County residents do not trust that approach, they like us checking the signatures by hand,” she wrote.
The county posts a report on how many ballots are left every Thursday afternoon. That report doesn’t say who’s winning. The county has until Dec. 4 to send its final results to the state.