SANTA ANA, Calif. — Inside the Orange County Registrar in Santa Ana is a team that’s been working long hours to send out the 1.8 million ballots to registered voters in Orange County. Tim Patterson is in charge of information technology for the registrar’s office and oversees the process.

“There’s one-page ballots and two-page ballots. Certain languages get up to three-page ballots,” he said.

For the past two weeks, his team, maybe a couple dozen at the most, has been working to prepare an average of 140,000 ballots per day.

“We have one operator that is kind of the lead in this room, and then we have someone who would be catching the ballots,” Patterson said.

The process is mostly automated. The ballots go through a long machine that looks like several copy machines in one. Along the way, an insert is added along with a return envelope. Every 100th ballot automatically gets kicked out for a quality control check.

“[The screener] will make sure that the address matches, that the right ballot type matches, that the right party type matches,” Patterson explained.

Once the ballots are good to go, they’re sorted in another machine by ZIP code and tracked.

“There’s a camera inside that’s taking a picture of every one of these envelopes that’s going through the machine,” Patterson said.

Bob Page, the OC Registrar of Voters, says voter turnout during the 2020 Presidential Primary was 50%, and since then, they’ve seen a steady increase in the number of vote-by-mail ballots being returned.

“We realized out of the 22 election that we needed to increase our capacity for processing mail ballots in our office,” Page said.

So this year, they got money from the county for more equipment, including two extra ballot sorters and additional ballot extractors.

“The more people that vote early, the more quickly we can have the results done,” Page said.

Finally, the ballots are put on palettes as they await pickup from the U.S. Postal Service and with 94 types of ballots in Orange County, 10 parties, and five languages, that’s 4,700 possible ballot combinations.

“At the end of the day, you’re getting a lot of ballots out in the mail to voters on time!” Patterson said.

He’s proud of his team, the unsung heroes of the election process.  

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