Election Day is nearly upon us, and officials with Merced County Registrar of Voters are giving residents key recommendations to ensure their ballots are counted.
As of Thursday evening, Registrar of Voters Melvin Levey said his office had received around 28,000 early ballots for the 2026 midterm election thus far – roughly 43% more ballots than the office received around the same time before the June primary.
The county’s electorate is 137,285 people, which means there are still a slew of ballots that haven’t been turned in.
At this stage in the game, Levey is advising voters against dropping those ballots in the mail. That’s because of recent changes in the U.S. Postal Service that require mail from Merced and Valley counties be sent to a processing center in West Sacramento.
Due to the time involved transporting mail that distance, officials fear ballots sent from Merced County might not be postmarked until after Election Day. State law requires all mailed ballots to be postmarked by 8 p.m. Tuesday.
Rather than dropping ballots in a mailbox, Levey said voters should consider one of the following options instead:
- Return ballots at one of 15 official Merced County vote centers or a dropbox location. Visit the Merced County Registrar of Voters website for a full list of those locations. Ballots can also be returned to the Registrar of Voters Office at 2222 M St. in Merced. Dropboxes are regularly serviced by elections officials, and those ballots do not require a postmark.
- Vote in-person at a vote center or at the Registrar of Voters Office. Voters have until 8 p.m. Tuesday to cast their ballot.
- If a Merced County voter does decide to mail their ballot, they should visit the service counter inside their local post office and personally ask for a hand-stamped postmark.
Levey said his colleagues in neighboring Valley counties are also pushing a similar message in order to decrease the number of rejected ballots. Roughly 1,200 ballots in Merced County were rejected in the June primary, likely because of the postal service rule. In Stanislaus County, the number of rejected primary ballots was around 2,131.
“One of the things that, particularly in the Central Valley, we’ve seen over the last year or so, is those increased rates of late ballots because of those postal service rule changes,” Levey told The FOCUS on Thursday.
“And so, all of us are trying to remind voters that … Instead of using the post office as your first choice, you know, think of it as the last resort, and try to use those ballot dropboxes. Come to the vote center, and drop off your ballot. All of us are really pushing that.”
Merced County has just under 300 people committed to working on the 2026 midterm elections. Levey said that includes 12 full-time employees, around 45 part-time county employees and around 230 volunteers.
So far, Levey said, the response from voters has been very positive.
“From about 5 a.m. in the morning until about 10 p.m. every single day for the last week or two, there has been some part of the elections department at work, and then prior to that, a lot of days and long hours to get ready for the election,” Levey said.
“It’s certainly been a lot of work just to get to this point. The elections department is obviously going to continue to work really, really hard here over the next week through Election Day, and then even after Election Day. The work is not over until we get every single ballot that is on time counted.”
Although the deadline to register to vote was Oct. 19, residents who are unregistered can still cast a conditional ballot. Visit a vote center location or the Merced County Register of Voters Office to do so.
The election results must be certified by Nov. 30.
People who have questions about voting can call the Registrar of Voters Office at (209) 385-7541 or visit www.mercedelections.org.