06/19/2026
Santa Barbara County just approved new ballot sorting equipment to replace a 12-year-old machine that was never designed for today's mail volumes.
📰 Read the full story in Noozhawk: https://hubs.ly/Q04m190g0
Before the pandemic, vote-by-mail ballots represented 20–40% of all ballots cast in the county. Today, that number sits above 80%. For Santa Barbara, with a voting population of 250,000, that translates to roughly 200,000 envelopes to process and tabulate. And in California, the vast majority of those arrive in the final day or two before Election Day.
County IT staff put it plainly at the Board of Supervisors meeting: they were running 90% vote-by-mail volume through a machine built to handle 40%.
That gap compresses into a bottleneck right when it matters most. Slower results, more pressure on staff, and more time before certified outcomes reach the public.
BlueCrest technology is built for exactly this kind of operational reality. High-volume mail processing is what we do, and ballot sorting sits squarely within that expertise.
Supervisor Joan Hartmann framed the stakes well: delay gives people an opportunity to be uncertain about results. Faster, more reliable processing supports public confidence in the process itself.
We're glad to support the work that keeps elections running accurately and on time.
