Riverside County Election Workshop Hopes To Build Voter Confidence Ahead Of Midterms

Months of public comment regarding concerns about election integrity in the county came to a head last week as the Riverside County Board of Supervisors held a workshop to receive an update from Registrar of Voters (ROV) Art Tinoco.

“My hope is that we are able to answer many of the questions that are coming from the public, as well as our board members, to ensure that we’re all on the same page,” Tinoco said at the start of his February 10 presentation.

A number of those questions revolved around a series of independent audits conducted by a group of local residents calling themselves the Riverside Election Integrity Team (REIT). The group said the audits showed large discrepancies between the number of ballots cast and the number of ballots counted.

Specifically looking at the November 4, 2025, statewide special election, the group said its audit identified a discrepancy of 45,896 between the number of ballots cast and the number of ballots counted.

The members of the group said their audit showed a total of 627,802 ballots had been delivered to the ROV’s office for the election, of which 16,376 ballots were rejected for various reasons, bringing the total number of ballots cast to 611,426. According to the final election results posted by the ROV, there were 657,322 ballots counted.

However, according to Tinoco, the actual discrepancy between the number of ballots cast and the number of ballots counted was 103. Data he provided during the presentation showed there were 657,219 ballots cast.

The difference between what REIT presented and what the ROV’s office presented, Tinoco said, was the result of a few factors. The first, he said, was that the group was missing ballots including confidential voters, conditional voter registration votes and provisional votes.

“If you add those numbers, you’re going to balance exactly like we did,” Tinoco said.

Secondly, Tinoco said, REIT was conducting its audit using raw data that came into ROV’s office before ballots were processed by election workers.

“None of these ballots have gone through any signature verification,” he said. “In there, you’re going to find spoiled ballots, you’re going to have ballots that were never signed by the voter, that needed to be cured. You will also find ballots where the signature does not meet the eligibility criteria, so the signature doesn’t match, and they also require a cure letter, and so on and so forth.”

The final factor was that the ballot statements and collection forms used by REIT to conduct its audit were prone to human error, since they were handwritten documents based on the hand-counting of ballots.

“The office uses these handwritten forms as reference guides only when auditing,” Tinoco said. “Because these documents reflect raw, hand-counted ballots before full processing.”

Tinoco said the ROV, on the other hand, used two machines: the Election Information Management System (EIMS), which tracks ballots cast at vote centers, drop-off locations and through the mail and also keeps track of whether each ballot is eligible to be counted, and the Liberty Vote System (LVS) is what scans and, starting on Election Day, counts the eligible ballots.

According to data provided by Tinoco during the meeting and previously sent to the California Secretary of State (SOS), Riverside County’s EIMS recorded 657,219 good ballots and the LVS returned a total of 657,322 ballots counted, a difference of 103.

“We had 103 less ballots credited, or envelopes credited in the EIMS, and we had more ballots counted,” Tinoco said. “That’s what this data is telling us.”

The Riverside Record was able to independently verify the ROV’s numbers with data provided by the state. However, the SOS said that the data from the EIMS, as reported on the Ballot Statistics Report (BSR), “does not have a correlation to the voting system ballot count.” 

Instead, the BSR shows data collected from voter participation and ballot records indicating vote history. The state added that it can be used to compare voter participation history statistics to statements of vote.

According to Tinoco’s office, there was an acceptable variance of 2% when it came to discrepancies between the information provided by the EIMS and the LVS, but the SOS said in an email to The Record that it does not set a threshold for the difference between ballots cast and ballots counted.

Members of REIT who conducted the audit, including a number of people who had previously volunteered to work elections, pushed back on Tinoco’s claims, saying that the paper trail of the number of ballots coming into the ROV’s office should be the most accurate statement of the number.

“Hundreds of ROV workers sign forms declaring the truthfulness of their accounts…only for those numbers to be magically changed once they enter some computer systems,” Shari Franklin, a member of REIT, said. “The proof is in the paper, and thanks to California’s mail-in ballot system, we have a physical, robust trail that can resolve these discrepancies.”

The group also bristled at the statement that they didn’t have all of the data, since they went back and forth with the ROV’s office to ensure they had all of the paper forms as well as all of the data about rejected, conditional voter registration, confidential and provisional ballots.

“Using our independent audits where we gathered the publicly available records, which is now called raw data, during the election,” Shari Franklin said. “We have tangible paper receipts from the ROVs own documentation to verify what was physically cast against, what was counted, spoiled or invalidated.”

Ultimately, the group members said they were not pointing fingers at the ROV, who they believed was just doing what was required of him by the state, but rather the state’s processes. It’s also why they invited Shasta County ROV Clint Curtis to talk with the supervisors about how his office conducts elections.

“Essentially, what is going on, apparently, is that you have someone who believes computers and someone who wants to do forms and paper,” Curtis said. “I can’t tell you which is right, we do forms and paper and people in Shasta County. We count better in Shasta County, I guess because ours come out dead even now.”

According to data provided to The Record by the SOS, the ballot statistics report had a discrepancy of 11 ballots between the report and the number of ballots cast as reported on the county’s certified election results.

When asked whether he knowingly sent inaccurate reports to the state, he said he sent in what the computer systems reported as required.

“That’s the way it works,” he said. “You know, they don’t care that much. They’re not looking for zero.”

The SOS, in an email to The Record, said the accuracy of the Statement of Vote submitted by counties was a “paramount concern of both the Secretary of State and the Elections Division,” and further said that if any clerical issues were identified, the office works “closely with the county elections official to correct them and ensure that the information is accurate.”

Curtis, who at the time was a Florida-based attorney with no ties to Shasta County and no experience running elections, was selected by the Shasta County Board of Supervisors to fill the role last May. Shortly after his official appointment, he announced his run for office in a private “town hall” event. November’s election was the first he’s ever run.

Curtis eliminated the use of electronic poll books and reduced the number of ballot drop boxes from 13 to four during the election, and his office failed to file a timely unprocessed ballot count with the SOS. On the day of the workshop, the Shasta County Board of Supervisors discussed allegations that he had misused public resources.

Curtis also told the supervisors that it took him an hour and a half to count the ballots, but three days after the election, his office had processed fewer than 40,000 ballots of the 65,000 cast in the county. In comparison, Riverside County had processed more than 567,000 ballots three days after the election.

“We are doing an amazing job in Riverside County, don’t know what else we could be doing differently,” Tinoco said. “I use a tracking system, I release results, all the information is there.”

Tinoco also explained to supervisors the voter roll maintenance process, automatic signature verification process and the procedures and policies in place to ensure ballots were not scanned more than once. He also expanded on the role of law enforcement in elections, including as part of the newly formed ROV Election Security Task Force and in investigating any irregularities.

Stephanie Nelson, an attorney in the county counsel’s office, detailed the ROV’s record retention policies, the role of the supervisors, pre-election voting system testing and the election canvass and audits.