Voting in Fresno County breaks records as voters wait in lines for hours

FRESNO COUNTY, Calif. (KFSN) — Voters broke records Tuesday night. as long lines formed at polling places throughout Fresno County.

Fresno County Clerk and Registrar of Voters James Cas says more than 40,000 voters went to the polls to vote in person or register on site.

The 2020 presidential election was far outnumbered by turnout.

“Based on the high turnout, we had a lot of people who were interested and maybe became interested in this process late in the process and so they wanted to come out to vote and participate,” Kus said.

In election centers from northeast Fresno to Clovis and even Coalinga, it took officials hours to close polls.

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Voters were still in line and were allowed to vote at 8 p.m.

County election officials worked past midnight to tally nearly all of the ballots cast by voters in person.

The first wave of data also included all early mail-in ballots, about 150,000.

“Overnight we actually provided three updates where we had results coming in from our election centers — in-person voting, early voting and Election Day — that we added to those in-person data,” Kas said.

Vote counting is still ongoing at the Fresno County election warehouse.

Officials are processing about 100,000 mail-in ballots received at drop boxes, vote centers and by mail on Tuesday.

“We run them through our processing machines. Signatures are compared, and then they are extracted, unfolded and packaged for tabulation,” explained Fresno County Elections Program Coordinator Nysen Armenta.

Kas plans to release updated results by Thursday evening.

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“We will continue to process and process and process. If necessary we will work on Saturday and then after the holidays we will return on Tuesday and we will have another results update on Tuesday by 5:00 pm. “, he said.

Despite long lines on election night and record turnout, Kas says there were only a few minor problems during the campaign.

Overall, he said, things went smoothly in Fresno County.

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