photo credit: Courtesy of Sonoma County 

With four days to go before election day, completed ballots are already back with the registrar of voters, and being validated. 

Deva Marie Proto, Sonoma County's Clerk-Recorder-Assessor and Registrar of Voters, tells KRCB that as of mid-day Friday, 40% of the 307,000 ballots mailed out to voters on October 7 have been returned.

She said local turnout should far exceed levels statewide and nationally. 

"Our actual turnout will be 85 to 90%, which is kind of based on historical returns,” Proto said. “We have a really strong turnout and a lot of very engaged people in Sonoma County, and they tend to turn out…we are anticipating that again for this election.”

Last weekend, Proto says about 500 voters took advantage of the open vote centers to cast their ballot. Several more centers will open this coming weekend.

Preliminary tasks are underway, but which boxes those voters chose to fill in won't be known or shared until election night at the earliest.

“As soon as they start coming back, we can start working on this signature checking the extracting and the scanning of the ballots,” Proto said “We do not actually tabulate any results until 8:00 PM on election night.”

As in recent elections, the public is being welcomed to keep tabs on the count. Proto said that in 2020 “we had people who were interested in observing, but our location is pretty tight. We don't have a fantastic observation area, so we wanted to see what we could do in terms of maximizing transparency. And so we started live streaming our tabulation room,” Proto said.

It may not make for the most exciting viewing, and the election department is not keeping exact count of how many people watch online, but streams of the tabulation room, the help room and the warehouse home of the sorting machine will be up around the clock until the vote is certified, likely in December. 

Proto urges voters to assure their ballot is postmarked or cast at a vote center or drop box by Election Day.

To view the livestream, visit the registrar of voters webpage, follow the YouTube link and click on "live now."