Last-minute voting, mail-in ballots; Fresno’s election chief explains sluggish count

One week after the June 2 election, Fresno County has an estimated 31,350 ballots left to count. Several close local races are waiting for more votes to determine winners.

The trickle of results is a source of frustration for some voters and candidates.

James Kus, Fresno County’s registrar of voters, says he’s frustrated, too, but not with his office’s efforts or efficiency.

“I am frustrated by the number of late-in-the-process Vote by Mail ballots that we get every year,” he told The Bee on Tuesday after he released the latest vote count update.

He said with each election there’s a typical surge of last-moment drop-box ballots and others postmarked and mailed on primary day, which means they’re valid if they arrive within seven days.

Kus said his office received approximately 70,000 ballots on primary day, a combination of in-person delivery of ballots and drop-offs at several special boxes around the county. This election’s ballot is also two pages, which has doubled the typical time it takes to prepare the ballots for counting, he said.

“That is a gigantic pile,” Kus said. “We were staying up with that, but now suddenly you have one chunk, and you just can’t do that all at once. It must be spread out over that time.”

Early voting started on May 5, with an average of 3,087 ballots returned each day until the day before Election Day, according to logs posted by the election office.

Kus said early voting is the best option “if we want to have our results sooner than later. But we still have half our voters in Fresno County (and similar numbers in other counties) waiting until the very last minute to cast their Vote by Mail ballot.”

. .

Two-card ballot a “significant bottleneck”

It takes 24 hours to process a ballot, Kus said, from opening the envelope, unfolding the ballot, scanning the ballot into the system and matching signatures from what is on the ballot envelope to what is on file.

By the end of primary election night, Fresno County tallied 101,268 votes. In two updates, it has added 55,440 to the count.

"We learned that the extraction was a significant bottleneck, because this was our first election with two cards,” Kus said. Because there were more than 60 candidates for governor, a double-sided ballot was not enough for every state and local election.

The two-card ballot doubled the counting time, Kus said. Through June 9, the county tabulated 156,708 ballots —20,000 more than the same period in the June 2022 primary. In reality, that is 310,000 ballots, Kus said, on par with the last two November presidential election years.

Kus said normally than can tabulate 80,000 cards a day, but with the two-card ballot, it would be half.

“The real choke points for us right now are actually in that scanning signature verification, and then eventually now we’ve learned in the extraction phase, we’re about 20,000, maybe 25,000 or where our limit is right now,” Kus said.

California election law allows votes to arrive up by mail up to seven days after the election as long as it had a June 2 postmark. Fresno County received 8,806 ballots June 3 through June 8.

Why not hire more staff? Daily updates?

Kus expects the same two-card ballot in November because of several statewide propositions.

“We need to be ready for that, and we’ve already seen where we need extra staff,” he said.

The county election office added extra staff since June 2 to help with unfolding and extracting ballots. Kus floated the idea of more extraction resources for 2028.

The election office released the initial ballot total shortly after polls closed 8 p.m. on June 2. It released two more updates that evening, and updates every Thursday and Tuesday since. Why not daily updates?

“We have to stop processing for a significant period of time,” Kus said.

To process an update by the end of the day, counting has to stop at 3 p.m., Kus said. He does not want to lose that processing time.

Counting ballots around the clock is not an option either, Kus said.

“While we would have the manpower to do that, we don’t have the supervisorial staff. We can’t have unsupervised staff, especially with secure things like a ballot,” Kus said.

Supervisors are needed at this time, not only to manage ballot counting, but also to verify voters who registered on June 2, process provisional ballots, and verify signatures on local and state petitions attempting to qualify for the November ballot.

“We might have our ballots done today, but then we’ve lost multiple days of preparing those fairly intensive-to-do same day registrations. We’re relatively small department,” Kus said.

As the elected clerk/registrar of voters, Kus is the department head and decides how prioritize to projects.

The next update, when most of the remaining ballots should be tallied, is Thursday. Kus plans to certify by June 26, the earliest day to do so by law.

Fresno County Vote Counting

David Taub

The Fresno Bee

805-215-8277

David Taub joined the Fresno Bee in 2026 after reporting 10 years for digital publication GV Wire. He has worked in the Fresno market since 2007. Prior to moving to the Central Valley, he worked for TV and radio stations on the Central Coast. He has also worked behind the scenes in local TV and radio. During his career, he has covered City Hall, the state Capitol, the White House and several houses of government in between. When not in a reporting capacity, he works tracking stats for the Fresno Grizzlies as an official scorekeeper, and also with televised basketball and football games. He has worked the Super Bowl, NBA Finals, and several MLB games. Growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area, Taub is a die-hard Giants and 49ers fan. He graduated from the University of Michigan with dual degrees in communications and political science. Go Blue!