Anxious voters find relief as they cast ballots in person

Before Dr. Michael Gisondi put his ballot through a scanner to secure his vote on Saturday, there was a brief moment of uncertainty: Does it matter if the Sharpie ink he used bled through the other side of his ballot cards?

This was an important election — perhaps the most important one of his life, the Stanford Hospital emergency physician said. Paranoid about mailing in his ballot, Gisondi came to the university’s Tresidder Memorial Union to vote at one of 99 vote centers in Santa Clara County that opened on Oct. 31.

“I wanted to see the machine telling me that my ballot was cast,” said Gisondi, who brought his 12-year-old daughter, Abby, to the on-campus vote center so she could witness the process.

A poll worker watching the scanner assured him that ink bleeding through the ballot is fine, as long as it doesn’t mark another answer on the other side of the page. The scanner also lets people know if there are any issues with their ballot.

“They showed me it scanned properly and that made me a lot more comfortable,” Gisondi said.

About 1.1 million vote-by-mail ballots were issued in Santa Clara County and more than half were returned as of Oct. 31. Through Nov. 3, voters in Santa Clara and San Mateo counties have the option to cast their ballot in-person at any vote center, each staffed with eight to 20 poll workers prepared for any issues people may raise during the high-stakes election.

“We went through all these scenarios during training,” said Dan Mahoney, the lead poll worker at the Palo Alto Art Center voting location. “You sit there and someone says, ‘OK, here’s somebody from out-of-state, here’s somebody from out of county, here’s somebody who hasn’t voted for (the) three presidential elections before, here’s somebody who needs to change their address, and so on.”

On Saturday morning, outside of the Art Center, former Palo Alto Mayor Lanie Wheeler and her husband, Jim Miller, sat by a parked truck filled with personal protective equipment, voter guides, extension cords and any other materials a vote center might need.

They were part of Santa Clara County’s Logistics and Supply Centers team that serves the six vote centers in their city. Throughout the whole county, there are 20 trucks and teams of people like Wheeler on standby, ready to be deployed if they get a call from a vote center that needs more equipment.

Poll worker Larry Sekuler, who was stationed 5 miles away at the Church of Scientology Silicon Valley in Mountain View, felt having a supply team at his immediate disposal helps make the county better prepared this election season.

“In the (March) primary, it took us several days to get all of our equipment like extra extension cords,” Sekuler, 68, said. “When we got here on Thursday, everything was already here. … We did need a couple of extension cords and those arrived Friday.”

To Sekuler’s estimate, he’s participated in about 40 elections within the past 17 years. He remembers his first one, the state gubernatorial recall election in 2003, when Gray Davis was replaced by Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Sekuler, who is retired, considered sitting this one out. With the coronavirus pandemic, he’s at an age that puts him at a higher risk of experiencing severe symptoms. But when he saw the equipment the county had ready — such as gloves, masks, face shields and hand sanitizer — he quickly signed up.

COVID-19 protocols also have been stringent since training day, the Mountain View resident said.

In previous elections, he recalled how the county’s Registrar of Voters office would have large group training sessions of 100 people. This time, with the restrictions on large gatherings, Sekuler said the county held smaller group sessions of up to 12 people. This helped make the classes more in-depth and hands-on, allowing each trainee time to work with the actual equipment they would use at the voting centers, he said.

“The training used to be a joke,” Sekuler said. “Now, it’s as good as any that I’ve seen.”

At the centers, voters are greeted outside by masked volunteers. (The actual voting is done indoors, but there also are curbside options.) Inside, poll workers sit behind Plexiglas as they sign people in on touchpads. After people check in and vote, a designated volunteer will immediately wipe down the surfaces before the next person. Every step of the voting process will also have a worker nearby to make sure voters don’t have any issues.

“It’s pretty safe and secure,” said Melissa Martinez, lead poll worker at the vote center in East Palo Alto’s St. Francis of Assisi Church in San Mateo County and who previously worked in about five other elections.

At 10 centers across Santa Clara and San Mateo counties, there were little to no lines, fights or issues with in-person voting on Saturday, according to each lead poll worker at the vote centers.

In East Palo Alto, Ernest Williams came to the Lewis and Joan Platt YMCA with his 8-year-old son, VinEli Damper. He was on edge about some of the recent news surrounding voting in this year’s election, such as reports of some who undermined the security of mail-in ballots and of people waiting in miles-long lines to vote, which Williams was also prepared to do to make sure he cast a ballot.

“If I have to stand in line for two days, I will,” the East Palo Alto resident said.

Coming out of the vote center, Williams was comforted by the ease of the process. In particular, he appreciated the options to either use traditional paper ballots or touchscreen monitors, which are available at every vote center.

Both methods are equally safe, since every ballot must go through a scanner. Williams preferred to use the touchscreen machines so he didn’t have to worry about completely filling in the bubbles in a paper ballot and was assured when his answers were printed on a high-resolution printer.

The centers throughout both counties — 144 in total — have also proven to be a large source of convenience and flexibility for some voters.

Palo Alto resident Essam Abu-Ghoush was biking in Menlo Park with his wife and two children on Saturday when he passed by numerous “VOTE” signs and banners near the Arrillaga Family Gymnastics Center on Laurel Street. The sight compelled him to step inside the center, where San Mateo County poll workers provided him with a generic ballot to vote in the presidential election.

Abu-Ghoush was not able to complete a ballot for local candidates and measures, which he can do at a center in Santa Clara County where he’s registered to vote. Pat Mach, the lead poll worker at the Arrillaga vote center, emphasized that people are discouraged from voting outside of their home county if it can be avoided.

“We were planning to vote later, but when we were biking we saw the signs and thought, ‘OK, let’s do it, now,'” Abu-Ghoush said. “It’s very convenient.”

Vote centers are also equipped with poll workers who can provide translation services. The center at St. Francis of Assisi Church, for example, had poll workers who could translate in Spanish, Portuguese and Russian.

“I heard because of COVID-19, not a lot of seniors might be volunteering,” said Guillermo Surraco, 60, a poll worker at the East Palo Alto vote center, who also speaks Spanish and Portuguese. “So I had to help out.”

Vote centers in Palo Alto, Menlo Park, East Palo Alto and Mountain View didn’t see too many voters or long lines on Saturday. Some locations had more visitors than others. But even in locations with low turnout, records were still broken.

At the Church of Scientology, for example, 66 people voted by the end of day on Saturday, according to Susan Slater, the lead poll worker at the vote center. It’s low, but it already beats the number of voters who came to the church during the week it was open for the primary election earlier this year, she said.

In contrast, the voting center at St. Timothy’s Episcopal Church on Grant Road, which is much smaller, but located near a major thoroughfare, saw a little more than 100 voters show up that same day, according to lead poll worker Phil Lonsdal.

For Mahoney, the lead poll worker at the Art Center, slow days like Saturday were welcomed since it gave workers a chance to rotate between different stations and equipment. It also served as a trial run to prepare the workers for the spike of last-minute voters many of the lead poll workers have said they expect on Nov. 3.

Does Mahoney and his team feel ready?

“Absolutely.”