Editor’s Note: Politics Focus is a weekly opinion column written by Garth Stapley, Modesto Focus accountability reporter. To have it delivered directly to your inbox, subscribe to our newsletter.
Hey Focus fans.
Sorry, no happy exclamation point this time with the above greeting. I’m in a bad mood.
As hard as this is to believe or accept, a total of 5,150 ballots cast by Stanislaus voters in the past two elections – November 2025 and June 2026 – were not counted.
This was not voter fraud. Nor was it because of the competence level of Stanislaus elections officials, proven time and again to be quite high.
Those 5,150 ballots were rejected because they were postmarked too late to count.
It’s really not the fault of voters, who probably dropped their ballots in the mail a day or two before Election Day, or on Election Day itself. In times past, waiting till the last minute was perfectly sound.
Why thousands of Stanislaus ballots end up in the waste bin
But a change in the US Postal Service’s routine now takes anything mailed in Modesto or Turlock or anywhere around here all the way up to West Sacramento, where it receives a postmark stamp before heading off to its destination. The federal policy change requiring a processing center to do the stamping also affected tax returns this year.
The extra travel time can result in a postmark a day or two or three after a ballot is mailed here, and any ballot not postmarked by Election Day must be rejected.
The result is stacks of hundreds and even thousands of ballots piling up in the Stanislaus elections office, which by law cannot process them.
Folks, this is an American democracy tragedy of epic proportion.
And it’s entirely avoidable.
Too many Modesto, Stanislaus and Merced voters unaware
In the November election deciding one issue – Proposition 50, redrawing Congressional district boundaries (affecting both Stanislaus districts, by the way) – 3,019 of us totally wasted our time when we cast ballots too late to be lawfully counted.
And despite efforts to alert people – by myself in this very column, on May 14 and May 28, and by other media, and by elections officials willing to tell anyone who would listen – Stanislaus voters in the June primary cast 2,131 ballots too late, County Clerk-Recorder Donna Linder told me.
Imagine the field day conspiracy theorists on either extreme would have if word got out that some oddity made 5,150 votes disappear from any spot in the entire United States. That’s become our reality.
This hasn’t become national news, presumably, because it’s not intentional mishandling or incompetence, and our weird postal routing problem may be happening in other places at some distance to postal processing centers.
My colleagues in Merced County, for example, found that the same postal routing issue caused a total of nearly 3,000 ballots to be squandered in the past two elections. Those marks amount to more than 2% of ballots thrown away in each of these neighboring counties in each election.
Government representatives, please get to work protecting local votes
Our Stanislaus representatives – particularly Reps. Tom McClintock and Adam Gray in the US House, who should have some sway with the US Postal Service – should make it a priority to explore solutions to this vexing problem. Our state representatives, Sen. Marie Alvarado-Gil and Assemblyman Juan Alanis, should consider how California government might pressure the feds to fix this for us, or find a state-based solution.
It’s not just an ignorable glitch.
Thousands of votes lost from any election can dramatically alter outcomes. Remember that Gray was elected two years ago by capturing just 187 votes more than incumbent John Duarte in the House’s closest race that year.
More important is making sure our voices are heard and counted – all of them.
Many voters spend hours, sometimes over several weeks, carefully studying candidates and issues – reading websites, sifting through mailers, watching Modesto Focus debates – before making informed choices. It’s a travesty to think all that effort, despite best intentions, is being wasted by the thousands.
Until a fix is found, visiting a voting center just before or on Election Day, or placing your ballot in an official dropbox, or mailing your ballot at least a week before the election remains your best bet.
Feel free to share notes, tips and insights for Stanislaus-centric campaign coverage at garth@themodestofocus.org.