Last Unresolved House Race Drags On in California
The Republican incumbent is currently trailing his Democratic opponent by 165 votes in the 13th Congressional District.
Duarte has been serving the 13th Congressional District, which encompasses parts of Fresno, since 2023. Gray represented California’s 21st Assembly District, covering all of Merced County and parts of Stanislaus County, from 2012 to 2022.
Recently, volunteers from both parties have been actively engaged in assisting with the “cure ballots” process, addressing signature discrepancies on ballots to enhance their candidates’ electoral prospects. However, according to Melvin Levey, the registrar of voters for Merced County, December 1 was the final date for voters to resolve any ballot curing issues.
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According to Levey, Merced County had 1,104 ballots requiring attention. Between November 26 and December 1, the county processed cure letters from 378 voters, which were successfully validated and included in the results, leaving 726 ballots that could not be corrected.
“Merced County experienced unprecedented levels of curing activity for this election,” Levey noted. “With both congressional candidates and their supporters, as well as many local candidates, seeking challenged signature voter data, we witnessed higher response rates to cure letters than ever before, along with an increase in inquiries regarding the curing process.”
Ballot Curing Process
In Merced County, the signature on a mail-in ballot envelope is scanned by machine and compared to the voter’s signature on file. When signatures fail this initial verification, election workers conduct a manual review to confirm or invalidate them.
Ballots that do not pass manual verification are set aside, and voters are notified via mail, phone, or email about the challenge to their signature, along with an opportunity to correct it by submitting a signature correction form.
Campaign volunteers can independently contact voters and even deliver signature forms back to the county registrar’s office on behalf of voters. However, these signature cure initiatives by campaign volunteers are not connected with the county, as clarified by the registrar’s office.
Political candidates’ campaigns may apply for access to voter information through the registrar’s office to identify voters whose ballots might require verification. It is the volunteers’ discretion which voters to contact for curing their ballots. Nonetheless, neither the voters nor the campaign personnel had access to the actual mailed ballots nor could they alter the contents of those ballots.
Finally, once voters return their signature verification forms with updated signatures, the county registrar checks those signatures against their records to decide if the ballots should be counted. The ballots remain sealed until their signatures are validated.
Travis Gillmore and Kimberly Hayek contributed to this report.
