In the pandemic year 2020, you can designate voting as just one more thing we do alone.
Envelope by envelope, thousands of mail-in votes are landing in red boxes across San Francisco’s ballot drop-off locations.
In-person polling places … not so much.
One ballot drop-off is located in every San Francisco supervisorial district, and so far they’re recording far more ballots than the number of votes cast at polling places.
Outside the San Francisco Public Library’s Anza branch, a ballot drop-off location for District 1, more than 400 ballots had been dropped off by noon, while inside the library only 35 people had cast their ballots in-person.
That ratio roughly held true in Chinatown, where Portsmouth Square’s red boxes were filled with 280 ballots, and only 33 votes were cast in-person just a block away, at the City College of San Francisco campus.
John Arntz, director of the city’s Department of Elections, said turnout was “light and hasn’t really picked up to what we’d expect for a presidential turnout. … The return of the vote-by-mail ballots is the highest that we’ve ever seen as far as return rate is concerned.”
Voters told KQED it was a matter of convenience. But why not simply mail in that ballot, rather than dropping it off? In California, as long as ballots are postmarked by Nov. 3 and received by county elections officials by Nov. 20, they are counted.
Mostly, people were worried that past a certain point, the mail was not a good bet so close to Election Day.
At Portsmouth Square, Daniel Williams, who has lived in Chinatown for a year, dropped off his ballot Tuesday. He hails from Iowa, where his friends have experienced lost ballots.
“It could get lost in the mail,” Williams said, simply. “It seems better to drop it off.”
–Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez (@FitzTheReporter)