2:00pm | With Election Day fast approaching next Tuesday, Long Beach City Clerk Larry Herrera is expecting some long hours.
“I’m going to try to break the Guinness World Record for city clerk that stays up the longest,” Herrera joked on Thursday morning. “My previous record is 22 hours. I’m going to try for 30.”
Joking aside, Herrera and his staff have plenty ahead of them.
Tuesday’s election ballot includes a race for Mayor, five City Council districts, City Attorney and Prosecutor, three Long Beach City College seats and one Long Beach Unified School District seat.
Results will begin to post live when the first mail-in ballots are counted, somewhere between 8:10-8:45pm on Tuesday evening. Precincts will begin reporting between 9:30pm-10:00pm, and Herrera says final counting will not be completed until around 6:00am on Wednesday.
Live election results will be posted on lbpost.com as they become available.
Despite the sheer number of votes that will need to be processed, Herrera is proud that results will be available so quickly. And accurately.
“Those hours are normal because we have a very accurate voting system,” he said. Tuesday will be the fifth time Long Beach has used the computerized system, and human counters will be on hand to catch anything the system misses.
Herrera says that previous systems caused between a 5-10% error rate, while the current system makes a mistake just 0.9% of the time. In a race that will rely heavily on mail-in balloting, that accuracy is profoundly important.
Herrera says that his office has received about 32% of the 53,000 mail-in ballots that were distributed to registered voters, and that he expects a few thousand more to come in before Monday. That’s a major chunk of the voting populace that has already made up their mind before Election Day even begins.
Voters should mail their ballots by Friday. “Or they can just walk their ballot right into City Hall by Monday,” says Herrera.
Long Beach even launched a campaign encouraging mail-in voting, using the video provided below to laud its benefits. Of course, there will still be plenty of polling places set up throughout the city on Tuesday, and you can find your nearest polling place on the City Clerk website. You can also check the status of your mail-in ballot on that website, once you’ve sent it in.
If you’re planning on casting your ballot on Tuesday but suddenly have to travel and won’t be able to, you can request an emergency ballot at City Hall until Monday. It’s just another way that Herrera is trying to make the voting process easier as he chases that ever-elusive Guinness World Record.
“I could use the publicity,” he laughs.
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