 You're tuned into the COVID-19 community report here on KDRTLP95.7 FM in Davis, California. I'm Autumn Lab A-Reno and today is Tuesday, December 15, 2020. We're sharing local news and resources focusing on what's impacting Davis and nearby cities in Yolo County during the COVID-19 pandemic. My guest today is Jesse Salinas who serves as the assessor, clerk recorder, chief election official for Yolo County. And we'll get to that interview in just a few minutes. If you're listening live this week, you're doing so during KDRT's fall fundraiser. As this unusual year comes to an end, we are particularly grateful to all our listeners, supporters, participants, volunteers, and extended community. We've all rallied together to adjust to social distancing, and yet we've remained connected through our unique local programming like this show. We invite you to tune in here throughout the week at KDRT95.7 FM or stream via kdirt.org to enjoy some special holiday cheer that our DJs are happy to share with you today through December 21. And as an extra special holiday treat, we're thrilled to be airing the 17th annual Home for the Holidays Concert Thursday, December 17 at 7pm with an encore presentation on Winter Solstice Monday, December 21, also at 7pm. Find links and more at kdirt.org and thank you. A reminder that as of December 10th, Yolo County is under the state's regional shelter in place order. Multiple industries are impacted due to this change. Again, you're going to want to see YoloCounty.org for all the details there. But in a nutshell, don't go anywhere. You don't have to go. Don't see anyone. You don't have to see where a mask, keep your distance, and wash your hands. This has actually been a really big week and COVID related news. As of yesterday, we have 6,117 confirmed cases in Yolo County and a total death count of 89. But since Friday, Yolo County has reported 340 new cases of COVID-19. About 41 of those individuals are projected to require hospitalization within the next couple of weeks, and eight will likely require intensive care. And again, that's just from the last three days of test results in our county. On a hopeful front yesterday, the first vaccines from Pfizer began rolling out across the nation from the pharmaceutical giants, Michigan headquarters. This morning was expected to receive approximately 325,000 initial doses. Yolo County will receive 975 doses that will be given to health care workers at our local hospitals, and then at our long-term care facilities, and then paramedics. No word yet on additional doses or when they will be available to community members, but it looks like we're looking at a late spring to early summer timeline there. The testing for the COVID-19 virus via Healthy Davis Together in December is available at the Davis Senior Center, 646 A Street and the Mondabi Center 523 Murak Hall Drive on the UC Davis campus. This is for asymptomatic individuals only for anyone who lives or works in Davis and for times, dates and appointments, you can visit Healthy Davis together.org slash testing. And if you still need a flu shot, you can get one this Thursday, December 17 from four to 7pm at the Yolo County Office of Education, located at 1280 Santa Anita Court in Woodland. You can make a reservation by calling 530-312-5858 or you can walk in. This is not a drive-through facility and you must wear a face covering and physically distance. We're going to take a moment for music and we'll be right back with Jesse Salinas. All right, my guest today is Jesse Salinas who serves as the assessor, clerk, recorder, chief election official for Yolo County, shortened to ACE. I last spoke with Jesse back at the end of September when he and his staff were ramping up for a vote by mail. We're touching base today to talk about lessons learned during this time of COVID and what voting in Yolo County could look like moving forward. Thank you so much for joining me. Well, thank you, Autumn, for inviting me. So as your title indicates Jesse there's an awful lot under your purview, but it was really the election work that took center stage this year. So I know you presented to the Board of Supervisors earlier today kind of a wrap up of where you've been. Can you walk us through what had really be a Herculean effort of managing an election during a pandemic? Think back. What was it like to have to get the news and have to shift to vote by mail? Well, thank you again, Autumn, for the invitation today and it was quite a shift. All I can say is that when we started looking at the traditional polling places and what we discovered from the March primary is that we had a bit of a crisis in terms of poll workers. And just to kind of give it a little snapshot of what took place back then. In March, it was the very beginning of the COVID outbreak. And we were losing poll workers at an extraordinary rate on election day and it was just the very tip of the announcement of COVID. We knew we had to make a lot of changes and there were changes that were being discussed statewide with the Secretary of State's office and registrars across the state of how we were going to try to put this election together. So I can give you a little insights and what that was like as we were going through this and this was right after we certified the election and in that early part of April we were starting discussions and it went through the early part of summer, but by the end of April, the early part of May, we were getting a pretty clear idea of what was going to be happening regarding this November election. And that was the implementation of a more of a voter assistance centers as we call them here in Yolo County, but the Waters Choice Act is Sacramento County and a few of the other counties had talked about and had implemented in the March primary, there were actually 15 of those that were doing that in the March primary, and it just reduced the number of polling places to be able to service on this expected difficult November election. Now when you say you were losing poll workers, that sounds like that was part of a trend statewide not just Yolo County and why was that. Well, a lot of the workers as you probably are familiar with a lot of our poll workers that were traditional poll workers are folks who have been retired and are coming back to help out as part of their volunteering and helping to make a difference in our society and democracy. And so a lot of them were at risk in terms of the categories that we were talking about in COVID early on. So what ends up happening is we had folks that, you know, those who who actually stepped away were those that were in that category the at risk category. They were both the actual poll workers but even our inspectors who are more seasoned veterans I'll call them that have been running elections for a number of years they were also dropping out at a high rate and those are the people we turned to really run our elections because at the polling site because they've had years of experience running elections. Got it. So, yeah, the news came down from from the state and it became clear that we were going to shift to all vote by mail. And that's really a sea change of course here in Yolo County, that options been available, you know, for a number of years I know my husband tells himself of that. And, and all of a sudden it went to all of us, voting by mail. I can only imagine how many times you had to answer certain questions and how I know how concerned people were for things like tracking their ballot was my ballot received is it okay. So how, how did your staff come together to to manage that transition and had it had to be enormous and enormous task. That was the challenge I mean the benefit for Yolo County is, you know, in the past election in March, 70% of all of our voters were vote by mail. So the lift wasn't as big as perhaps some other states have had to deal with in this past election, but it still was a massive change in dealing with educating voters who had never actually experienced it as you've talked. And we shared here that they weren't confident and of course some of the, some of the language that was coming out at even a national level about the confidence and vote by mail made our job more difficult because there were people that were doubting the integrity of the vote by mail process. So we did a lot of outreach as you probably have seen in terms of more press releases more presentations, more radio interviews and I'd ever done in my life really in the span of two to three months and just doing our best to get the media to understand and let the community know that it was a safe and secure process and as much as we try there's still a few out there that still had doubts because of what was being proposed and shared at a national level but I think by and large people were starting to have confidence in what we were doing here in Yolo County. And you have such transparency in your office too I mean I know that there's always members of the public involved during the counting there's there's really quite a bit of transparency there. I guess I'm curious about it since I mentioned the counting. So, so how did that unfold because you had votes that were being counted on election night but then there were votes that kept coming in for a while. And then there was this process where you certified the vote can you tell us what that means. Sure, I'm happy to walk you through that and to your listeners. So as you noticed on election night. There is that first results as a large number it. It's a significant number of ballots that have come in through the vote by mail process that we can start processing, not counting, but processing before election night. And then once election night happens and it's after eight o'clock and all the polls have closed, we can then upload and tally those results. And then whatever we pull in on election day those results then get posted later on in the evening, as we go into the night. So those are the first phase and second phase and then the third phase as you're referring to is what's called the canvas. And then all the vote by males that are dropped off at either a voter assistance center on election day, they're male to us and in this election this is one of the changes that was made as a result of new legislation both an executive order and legislation on the vote by mail process is that ballots that came in through the mail could be received not just three days after the election if postmarked on election day, but could come in up to 17 days later. They had to be postmarked on election day. So that process of allowing ballots to come in later as long as they were meeting that election day deadline, got increased and pushed out the the actual certification deadline for us because we had to wait for that deadline to pass before we can start doing our final processing of all those vote by mail ballots. So that's the definition on election day. And because keep in mind that one of the changes that took place with this new model is that individuals could come in voters could come in on a Saturday, Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday so they had three days even before election day to cast their ballots at one of our voter assistance centers. So anybody that actually came in and there were issues that they needed to resolve or they wanted to actually register and vote on the exact same day. They were given what's called a conditional or provisional type of ballot depending on their situation, and those ballots that are were conditionally and or provisionally provided. We had to take care of and process as part of the canvas period, which means after election day, we have a period of time before we actually can certify and finalize the election, and that's known as the canvas period. So, we had to go through all those processes and again we were transparent as you probably saw we send out press releases and say it's open to the public. We had to adhere to social distancing requirements but people were here. Pretty much every day throughout the entire canvassing process which we certified on December 1, watching watching everything that we did in that process. And, you know, not only did we have the shift to vote by mail and all the changes that you know as you've been describing, and in the middle of a pandemic, we also had other significant shifts and Davis for example the shift to district elections I can tell you from my work on local elections here. We've never had to produce for show programming for a city council election and a school board election. At the same time they're usually staggered. And, and so that switch was interesting from my perspective and it made for a lot of candidates so you had a lot of counting to do. We had a lot of counting and it actually complicated matters quite a bit in Davis in particular because you had, for example, in the school board race, you had a couple of district elections and then you had one, which was still in that large because it was filling a vacancy that had been created by the departure of one of the persons that had served on the school board. So you had a combination of two districts and an at large to go along with a couple of district elections for the city council. We had large elections with the bond measures so that there was, there was quite a bit happening, the city of Davis, and it made for some, actually there were some folks that were pretty confused over a way why is this candidate not on my ballot well you're not in their district and we had to try to explain that and share that correct information because there was some false information that was being passed by other media outlets that were sharing incorrect information but we were hopefully able to correct that moving forward. Yeah, we did a total of 26 meet the candidate statements or campaign statements in the case of the local bond measures, and that was record setting for us in a local election the typical is more somewhere around 1516 so it was. I thought of you a lot during that time because we were dealing you know with our with our portion of it here. So we're still talking about numbers. I am really curious what the final voter turnout was like in in Yolo County for this time and was it, you know, relative to other elections was it more was it less and was it what you expected. Well, I have to share with you it was, it kind of. It was a huge number that more than we had expected because given the, the COVID outbreak we didn't know how the community was going to react to an all vote by mail or this voter assistant center model. And what it was, they were huge numbers so to give you a context, and we went back and I, in anticipation of what the numbers might be I took a look back at the last 30 years of presidential elections and we're talking about the November presidential elections just for comparison. It was a pretty consistent pattern that for the most part we've been around 76. I think one year it was I think 2004 we were actually at 77% of registered voters that actually came and cast a ballot in those elections. So my thought is we might actually broach, you know break the 80% threshold I was ambitious thinking we could do this we could break 80%. And as it turns out, we ended up with an 83% voter turnout of registered voters, which is just a phenomenal number, huge number. I think when you look at it again out of 119,000 registered voters going in to election day, we had 99,000 cast ballots, I mean that's again just a huge turnout. What's powerful about the numbers is that the vote by mail made up 93, almost 94%, but 93.73% of all of those that were cast. So a huge number of folks, you know, voted by mail. And I will share with you the aspect of that was interesting again only some 6000, over 6000 actually voted in the voter assistant centers with a live ballot. And what we have found out that was a huge success is our drop boxes, our drop boxes that we put throughout Yolo County and I need to give you some context here. We did do drop boxes in in March. And what we did is we partnered with the libraries to put these drop boxes at selective libraries, county libraries and even at the city library here in Woodland because it's not part of the county library system. We had really a little over 1300 people that dropped off their ballots in the March election to give you a context of comparison and it's, it is kind of mind boggling when you think of the numbers for this election this past November election. We had 51% of the, the 92,000 over half of them came in through the vote by mail drop boxes. And, you know, if you think about that that's a huge number Jesse. Yeah, huge, huge, but you know how to tell you what what we did differently to which is significant is by law, we were required to have eight of them spread throughout 120 because for every 15,000 registered voters and when I was looking when you talk about projections and how you're trying to set up for this election. I shared with staff my projections is that we might have a high of up to 120,000 I thought that was a high watermark of registered voters that we would have but I anticipated we'd end up anywhere from 117 to like 120 somewhere in that range so we ended up at 117 it was within the range of projections that we had laid out. And so, knowing that, and if I looked at my calculations of how many voter assistance centers which was for every 10,000 registered voters you needed a voter assistance center so that's why we put 12 out in the county I was expecting to have to 120, I would have that completely covered, which we did, but the other element was the, the dropboxes, and that the way that legislation was written is for every 15,000 registered voters you would need a dropbox, which that equates to eight dropboxes throughout Yolo County, but we got aggressive here in Yolo County because I knew that would be a real very helpful way and easy way for people to drop off their balance. And this is before the whole United Postal Service, you know, issue was had it reared its ugly head. So this decision was made back in in actual June, where I just got really aggressive and said we're going to put out 12. So we did 50% above what what was required. So we put out 12 of those boxes. And what we did is we also partnered with nugget market. In the 80s. We put them, we put some 24 seven we partnered with the like the city of Davis we had we put a 24 seven box that was outside of the, the city hall. We also did that in in West Sacramento, and there was a box 24 seven box that we put outside of our office here but across the street over at the post office. So they just drive up drop off their back their ballot and drop it off in the dropbox and keep going as a matter of fact I dropped off my ballot at the nugget market on coval Boulevard. And when I got there, someone was taking they were doing a pickup of the ballots, and I was a little confused and so I walked up and I asked her can I drop my ballot off and she, she swung her hair out of the way showed me her vest and her badge and she said just to let you know I'm an official representative, and I can take it for you I'm you know I'm doing a pickup now and she was great it was, I had absolute confidence dropping my ballot off so that was wonderful. And that's what we heard people love the dropboxes and they felt it was secure they could depend on it, but to think that over 92,000 more than 50% of our voters dropped it off in those male return dropboxes is huge and we continue that partnership and build upon it moving forward so yeah we we struck gold with that. Yeah, well good for you for, you know, going above and beyond with the the 12 drop off locations, especially when we were seeing the news come out of places like where there was one for a county that had four times the population as as Yolo County, and also, you know this to Yolo County is a very large very geographically and culturally diverse county. And so it makes sense to, if you're going to put that effort in to go a little bit further so so good on you for that. By the way, thank you. I'm really wondering what you think about the mail in vote by mail is that going to continue in future elections is there any going back after this or is this is this where we are now. That's a great follow up question in fact I need to engage the legislature and because they need to be able to modify the rules accordingly because the, the vote centers that we had versus the voter. The voters choice act is a little different the voters choice act model required the those centers to be open 11 days. And that's just, there was a lot of wasted time and the data shows that so we're hoping that they allow us to make it more of this model on November and so we really want to be very aggressive in sharing that data points with the legislature so they allows that flexibility but I do we've already heard that there's an interest in wanting vote by mail to be more of a permanent option, along with some of those in person voting options. So I do think this is kind of the where we're going as a state that we are going to have more vote by mail opportunities and with some I think there will always be some kind of in person because there's something there may be no language needs or other special needs you may have. So we're going to still have some in person options but you know given the success statewide of the vote by mail process I think this is the wave of the future this is what we're going to start seeing more and more of. And again people have just said how convenient it was and how much they appreciated that how safe and secure it was. Yeah, yeah, you did a great job with that we have just a minute or two left. And so what's our next significant local election cycle, for example, when will the the other half of the district elections take place. Well, you know what's interesting is you know they will typically be scheduled on a two year cycle. What we're finding out is that there are. There are some likely some special elections that are coming around the corner there was, you know, there's, there's some empty slots that have taken place as a result of some vacancies on some of the city council races. And so there are a couple of cities in Yolo County that are looking at potential having some special election so we're having some discussions with them on the timeline and how that would work. I would, I would otherwise if there's not a special election either in May or June, I could be pushed back to November as a, as a, what we call it a Udall, which is, I won't go into those details right now because that's a whole different day today, but we may have some things happen in this 2021, but typically we're in a two year cycle in our elections so all those that you're referring to should be except for those special elections should be taking place again next. And it'll be actually in 2022 it'll be in June it will not be in March, because the legislature has changed the rules, the presidential will be in the March, but the other off election cycle will be in June so it'll be June of 2022. All right, well thank you for that. I want to thank you for joining me today I want to thank you and your staff and just, you know, give you accolades until the cows come home for the really heavy lift you did during this for keeping it open and safe and transparent and for working so hard to help us get the vote out in Yolo County so thanks again for joining me. Thank you, I don't thank you and thanks to my staff for all the great work in the community who stepped up and all the partners it was really a community effort and we couldn't have done it without everyone support so thank you. All right, you have been listening to the COVID-19 Community Report here on KDRT 95.7 FM in Davis, California, owing to the holiday break and a little servicing needed on the KDRT transmitter I'm taking a brief hiatus, and I will be back on January 5. Thanks for tuning in and happy holidays.