Rejected mail-in ballots continue to be an issue in Merced County elections due to recent postal system changes affecting how ballots are postmarked.

The news comes as Merced County Registrar of Voters Melvin Levey on Friday officially certified the results from the June 2 primary election.

Levey told The Merced FOCUS around 1,200 mail-in ballots were rejected in the primary election because they were postmarked late – roughly 2.5% of all ballots.

A total of 46,791 ballots were cast in the primary, 34.28% of Merced County’s electorate (136,490 people). Rejected and late ballots are not included in that number.

The issue stems from U.S. Postal Service rules that went into effect in recent years, changing how mail is serviced. The rules come from a strategic 10-year plan the postal service announced in 2021.

Under the plan, mail from Merced and other Valley counties is now sent to a regional distribution center to be postmarked and processed. That’s been problematic for ballots, however, because the mail distribution center serving much of the Valley is 115 miles away from Merced County – in the Yolo County city of West Sacramento.

Because of the time involved transporting mail that distance, many ballots sent from Merced County likely weren’t postmarked until after Election Day – even if they were dropped in the mail days before polls even closed.

Ballots Must Be Postmarked by Election Day

In order for a mailed ballot to be valid in California, it must be postmarked on or before Election Day.

Back in May, the Merced FOCUS’s Rachel Livinal reported on how the postal service rule resulted in a deluge of rejected ballots for Merced and other Valley counties during last year’s Prop. 50 special election.

In comparison to the 1,200 rejected June 2 primary ballots, the Nov. 4 special election in Merced County resulted in 1,669 rejected ballots. Before the new postal rules took effect locally, in the 2024 presidential election there were 238 returned ballots.

Prior to the primary election, Levey and elections officials did outreach to Merced County voters with direct mailers, plus radio and digital advertisements, advising them to mail their ballots at least a week before June 2 in order to allow time for their ballots to be postmarked.

There are other measures voters can take to ensure their votes are counted. Those include:

• Requesting a postal worker to personally postmark your ballot at your local post office anytime before or on Election Day.

• Leaving your ballot at an official Merced County drop box or dropping it off at a vote center before 8 p.m. on Election Day. Those ballots are regularly serviced by elections officials and do not require a postmark.

More than half of the ballots the Merced County Registrar of Voters receives are from drop boxes and vote centers.

Taking Steps to Reduce Rejected Ballots

Levey said he and his office are already thinking about additional steps they can take to help decrease the number of rejected ballots for the Nov. 3 general election.

First, the roughly 1,200 voters whose ballots were rejected will each receive a letter from the Merced County Registrar of Voters informing them of what happened, and how they can prevent their ballots from being rejected in future elections.

Plus, Levey and his staff are having discussions with post offices about how they can work together to inform the public and address the issue.

“One of the things, for instance, we have been doing is talking to all the post offices to reinforce training that they receive about hand stamping, hand postmarking if they come to the counter on Election Day,” he said.

If voters must go into the post office on Election Day or the day before, Levey said, they should go to the counter and ask a postal worker to personally hand stamp a postmark on the ballot, right there, on the spot.

“Because then, regardless of when the machine will postmark it in (West) Sacramento, at least you’ve got a hand stamp postmark (and) we know that it was in the custody of the postal service on Election Day,” he added.

It’s unknown whether the 1,200 rejected votes would have made a difference in any of the Merced County races where the margins were narrow between candidates.

Levey did say he doesn’t think the rejected ballots disproportionately impacted one political party over another.

“What was interesting is that when we looked at the 1,669 (rejected) ballots from the November 2025 election, the party breakdown, for instance, mirrored almost exactly the percentage by party registration within the county,” Levey said.

The issue is also not exclusive to Merced County, as Levey said many county registrars in California are dealing with similar issues.

“This is a national rule change,” he said. “It’s something I think in Merced County, Stanislaus County, in the Central Valley (that) we are acutely aware of because we are a few hours from our (mail) distribution center.”

Certification of Primary Election Votes

Ahead of last Friday’s vote certification, Merced County Registrar of Voters staff were busy counting the remaining number of cured and challenged ballots from the election.

Ballot curing happens when there are complications that arise on a ballot. After a voter fills out their ballot, they must sign the front of the envelope before sending it off.

But sometimes complications result in the ballot being challenged. For example, the signature might not match the one on file for the voter, or the signature is missing altogether.

When that happens, election workers request another signature from the voter to make sure the ballot can be processed. Those ballots that have been verified are “cured.”

The county had a total of 121 cured ballots among 360 challenged ballots from the June primary, Levey said. The remaining 239 ballots were uncured, which is a typical number for a primary election.

The county had around 250 volunteers who stepped up to help with the primary election. Some of those folks worked just a few days, while others worked nearly a dozen or more.

Between the 14 vote centers and 20 drop boxes, Levey said Merced County had nearly 35 locations on Election Day where voters could take their ballots.

“We have more vote centers than we are required to by state code. We have about twice as many drop boxes as we are required to by state code,” Levey said. “It’s been very intentional so we can try and serve all the voters throughout the county, no matter if they are in a bigger community or a smaller community.”

How the Primary Compared to Other Elections

Despite the issue of rejected ballots affecting California counties, Merced County elections officials say there were a lot of positives with the June 2 primary election.

The 46,791 ballots cast was a significant increase in voter participation.

In comparison, the March 2024 primary ended with just under 38,000 ballots cast, while the June 2022 primary ended with just over 31,000 ballots cast.

Levey also pointed out turnout was only around 25% in California last’s gubernatorial primary in June 2022, compared to 34.26% this year.

“I think it goes to show that voters were pretty engaged for this,” Levey said. “For a June primary, that’s a relatively high figure. So seeing that number of ballots cast was pretty impressive.”

The Merced County Registrar of Voters will begin sending out ballots to voters on Oct. 5 for the Nov.  3 general election.