Ballot curing, by the numbers

Adam Gray may very well owe his seat in Congress to a 2018 decision on an ACLU lawsuit over vote-by-mail ballots.

On election night in November, the Central Valley Democrat found himself in a painfully familiar spot, trailing Republican John Duarte in the race for California’s 13th Congressional District. In 2022, Gray lost to Duarte in that same race by just 564 votes.

In the rematch two years later, the former state assemblymember was down about 3,000 votes after early returns.

But over the ensuing 28 days, Gray flipped the script – and the seat – by securing every vote he could, ultimately winning by just 187 votes. A close look at the numbers reveals Gray’s victory likely hinged on the votes his team secured through ballot curing, an arcane, campaign-insider process by which mail-in ballots with missing or unmatched signatures are certified after the election.

Ballot curing became a pathway for campaigns in California to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat when a San Francisco judge ruled in 2018 that state election officials can’t automatically reject mail-in ballots if they believe the signature on the envelope doesn’t match the signature elections files have on file.

The landmark ruling came in response to a 2017 lawsuit filed by the ACLU challenging election officials’ practice of discarding mail-in ballots when they thought the signatures didn’t match.

As a result of the judge’s ruling, which found that automatically rejecting ballots disenfranchised voters, election officials were forced to create a review process by which mail-in ballots with problematic signatures could be potentially deemed fit for counting after election day.

That became the ballot curing process, an “extra innings” feature of California’s closest races, as the Capitol pollster Paul Mitchell calls it.

In theory, ballot curing is straight forward. The registrar of voters in each country identifies every mail-in ballot submitted in which there is an unmatched or missing signature on the ballot envelope and reaches out to the voters, letting them know that their ballots will not be counted unless they take action.

If the voter responds, he or she will typically be asked to submit a new signature on what’s known as a cure letter or form. If the new signature is found to match the one on file, the letter or form turns a previously rejected ballot into valid one.

“If we have more contested, close races, we will see more engagement to ensure that every last vote is counted.”

However, that’s just how the process plays out in theory. In practice, ballot curing has become an extension of political campaigns – the extra innings Mitchell was referring to.

Campaigns have inserted themselves into the process by virtue of the list of problematic mail-in ballots being a public record. In a close race where every vote counts, campaigns will use the list to also reach out to every possible voter who could have voted for their candidate and encourage them to get back to the registrar of voters to get their ballot fixed.

In the case of California’s 13th Congressional District, election officials identified a total of 6,031 mail-in ballots with missing or unmatched signatures. Of those, 2,586 of the ballots belonged to voters registered as Democrats while 1,551 were for registered Republicans.

Ultimately, 2,227 of the Democrats’ ballots were fixed (86 percent) while 1,340 of the Republicans’ ballots were fixed (also 86 percent).

It’s impossible to know, of course, for whom each of those voters cast their ballots (voting is secret in the United States, after all). But it’s probably safe to assume that a sizable portion of the Democrats voted for Gray while many of the Republicans voted for Duarte.

If every registered Democrat voted for Gray and every registered Republican voted for Duarte, the cured ballots in that race would have given Gray an 887 vote advantage, which clearly would have mattered in a race only won by 187 votes. But even if every registered Democrat and Republican did not vote for their party’s candidate, curing almost certainly played a role in the race as the overall number of cured ballots in that contest (4,844) far outnumbered the margin of victory (187).

In fact, according to that standard, two other close California races, the 45th Congressional District in Orange County, which pitted incumbent Republican Michelle Steel and Democrat Derek Tran, and the 58th Assembly District in Riverside County, in which Republican Leticia Castillo faced Democrat Clarissa Cervantes, likely were impacted by the ballot curing process.

Tran defeated Steel by 653 votes in the 45th Congressional District. A total of 4,825 mail-in ballots were identified as problematic in that race, with 1,728 belonging to registered Democrats and 1,486 belonging to registered Republicans. Of those, 1,296 of the Democratic votes were cured (75 percent) while 934 of the Republicans were fixed (63 percent).

Even with Steel curing a higher percentage of the Republican mail-in ballots, Tran would have secured a 362-vote lead if all of the voters voted for their party’s candidate.

In the 58th Assembly District, the Republican, Castillo, defeated Cervantes in the Democrat-majority district by 566 votes. In all, 5,674 mail-in ballots with unmatched or missing signatures were identified in that race. Of those, 2,459 belonged to registered Democrats while 1,578 were registered Republicans.

Two thousand one-hundred and thirty-eight of the Democrats’ votes were fixed (13 percent) compared with 1,329 of the Republicans’ votes (16 percent). If every voter voted for their party’s candidates, that would have been an advantage of 809 votes for Cervantes, although that clearly wasn’t enough to get her to victory.

Ballot curing has added an entirely new layer to the already complex and stressful campaign and elections process, for both candidates and staffers, who Mitchell notes must be prepared to quickly morph from campaign mode “into phone calling, emailing, texting and door knocking ballot cure operations, or being shipped off to somewhere in the state where a race is likely to be won by a slim margin, and where curing can make the difference.”

And in most cases, that will cost money. As longtime political consultant and Grassroots Lab co-founder Robb Korinke notes, either the campaign itself or whatever major support group has the most vested interest in seeing their candidate win a hotly contested state or Congressional race could easily be looking at an additional $10,000-$30,000 on the low end, he says.

And there is no reason to think this will be anything but a fact of life for campaigns any time a race is close.

“Ensuring that every vote gets counted is a fundamental tenant of our democracy,” said Jeff Gozzo, a campaign consultant for Gray, who oversaw the candidate’s extensive curing operation. “If we have more contested, close races, we will see more engagement to ensure that every last vote is counted.”