Residents press Riverside County supervisors to delay March election certification over mail-ballot discrepancies
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Summary
Dozens of speakers urged the Board of Supervisors to postpone certification of the March 2024 primary until the Registrar of Voters provides audit logs, USPS receipts, and chain-of-custody evidence to reconcile reported discrepancies from 2022 and 2024 mail-ballot counts.
A stream of public commenters at the Riverside County Board of Supervisors’ April 2 meeting urged the board to delay certifying the March 2024 primary until county election officials can reconcile mail-ballot counts and produce chain-of-custody documentation.
Sharon Neil, who opened the public-comment block, asked supervisors: “Have you cleaned up the voter rolls for Riverside County since 2022? Has everybody that voted been a U.S. citizen and residing in Riverside County?” She said those answers must be “absolutely yes” before certification proceeds.
Other speakers described on-site observations at the Registrar of Voters (ROV) office. Diane Roby and Debbie Walsh said they saw trays of sealed mail-ballot envelopes postmarked March 5 that county staff told them were received late and therefore would not be counted. Shelby Bunch said the mail trays and photos she received suggested ballots were “kept in the office of an ROV employee” rather than in a visible processing area.
Veronica Langworthy of the Riverside Election Integrity Team cited California Elections Code section 15210 on chain-of-custody and said the group found inconsistent answers from the post office and ROV about how ballots are handled. She told supervisors the post office billed the ROV for 216,877 ballots in 2022 while the ROV counted 252,661 mail-in ballots, a discrepancy of 35,784 ballots that she said remains unexplained.
Registrar of Voters Art Tinoco addressed the concerns in a board response. He described the county’s handling of ballots under the “postmark plus 7” rule: ballots postmarked by Election Day may be received and accepted up to seven days after the election, and those received after that period are kept in separate bins and reviewed. Tinoco said each envelope’s postmark is examined and that trays of late ballots are labeled to show the date they were received. He told the board that about 5,000 ballots had been received late to date and that the law restricts the county’s ability to process ballots received after the statutory period.
Some public speakers called for additional steps before certification: an inspection of voting machines and servers for unauthorized modems; retrieval and review of audit logs for March 5 to look for anomalies; and reconciliation of USPS billing and pickup records with ROV counts. Jim Niederecker urged inspection of Dominion servers, tabulators and ballot-marking devices and suggested such inspections be witnessed by observers.
Board members acknowledged the public concerns and said they follow state and federal law on certification. Supervisors also noted technical limits: county staff said they do not control how the U.S. Postal Service handles ballots once accepted into the postal system, though they do separate and mark late-received envelopes under state law. The board did not announce a postponement of any certification at the meeting; it heard the public comments and requested follow-up with county staff.
What happens next: the ROV said cured ballots could be accepted until the county’s stated cure deadline, and the board may request further information from county staff about audit logs, USPS reconciliation and any follow-up inspections the ROV can perform or facilitate.
