Court orders Humboldt County to count 596 found special election ballots

Humboldt County will count 596 ballots that sat sealed in a locked drop box after the November 4, 2025 statewide special election, a late-discovered cache that put election chain of custody and certification back under scrutiny.

County officials said the ballots were found on May 4 and should have been counted before the county certified the election on Dec. 5, 2025. Because California law requires every eligible ballot to be handled properly, the county asked Humboldt County Superior Court for permission to open the ballots, count them and recertify the contest. The court granted the petition.

The county said the ballots were still sealed and there was no evidence they had been tampered with. Officials said the mistake stemmed from a miscommunication among election workers about whether the drop box had been fully emptied. The ballots came from the statewide special election on Proposition 50, California’s redistricting measure, and the county said counting them will not change the result.

The legal cleanup mattered because the ballots would ordinarily have been destroyed six months after certification under Elections Code section 17302. Instead of letting them disappear from the record, county officials secured them, worked with the California Secretary of State to determine the proper process, and sought a court order so the final tally could be corrected through formal channels.

Juan Pablo Cervantes, Humboldt County’s Clerk-Recorder & Registrar of Voters, apologized for the error and said his office had strengthened procedures and safeguards. The office has now added a new physical verification step that requires each drop box to be confirmed empty and secured before results are finalized.

The court order authorizes Cervantes to open and count the 596 ballots and include them in the final totals. The county said a supplemental certification must be issued by July 31, 2026, and the ballots must also be destroyed by that date. For Humboldt County, the result is a documented fix to a mistake that raised basic questions about whether every vote cast in the special election had been reflected in the official record.