LOS ANGELES >> Despite reports of ink-spoiled ballots and challenges to how votes are tallied, election officials up and down California said they were confident they could accurately count and certify the millions of votes that were expected to be cast this week.

“I am feeling pretty good. Every bit of our operation has gone very smoothly,” Natalie Adona, the registrar of voters in Nevada County, said Monday morning, despite having to buy a jeweler’s loop to see the flea-sized ink specks spoiling as many as 10% of mailed ballots. She called it “an annoyance.”

The printing glitch, called overspray, also marred as many as half of the mailed ballots collected by Monday in Shasta County.

Such garden variety mishaps are common, and not expected to derail California’s election process, even as heated rhetoric and attempts to interfere with vote certification ratchet up across the country.

Election officials here said they too expected local rejections of the vote or demands that ballots be counted by hand — even though state law mandates machine counting and only county registrars, not political boards, have the power to certify election results.

“It’s kind of silly,” said Yolo County Registrar Jesse Salinas, commenting on efforts to convince some county boards to interfere with the acceptance of voting results. “We don’t need that drama but its going to be there.”

In Shasta and Nevada counties, flecks of ink marring the bar codes printed on some ballots prevented voting machines made by Hart InterCivic from correctly reading those ballots.

Registrars in the two northern California counties began the painstaking task of transferring votes from unreadable ballots to duplicates that can be read by machine, a process that requires hand checking and has significantly slowed down the count. By Monday morning, Adona had a backlog of 20,000 ballots awaiting processing. Shasta County Registrar Thomas Toller said his office was reprocessing ballots at a speed of about 700 an hour.

Both registrars thought they could finish the job in time to certify the county’s presidential election results by the Dec. 3 deadline. But Toller was also navigating a contentious environment, where election dramas have fed into, and drawn support from, national election denial crusaders including MyPillow.com chief executive Mike Lindell.

“I’ve had observers show up who are understandably upset that this has happened. I’ve also had members of the community who ... just want to support my staff,” Toller said Monday. “So far they have been fairly civil to each other, haven’t had any shouting matches.

“That’s one of my goals — to keep the civil tone, and cool down the ardor of our observers.”

Shasta County has been a hotbed of conspiracy theories about election fraud for several years. In 2023, the board of supervisors voted to dump Dominion voting machines and attempted to switch to hand counting, triggering a new state law mandating machine reading in all but the smallest election contests (such as general elections with fewer than 1,000 voters).

In 2022, the Shasta board only narrowly, on a 3-2 vote, agreed to accept the registrar’s certification of the state primary, and it created an advisory election commission to continue to prod and investigate.

The advisory panel now seeks to audit the March primary, and one of its members in October joined a political separatist group in presenting the county with a “cease and desist” letter declaring the California election process to be “fraudulent.”

Shasta County Supervisor Tim Garman said it would not surprise him if the ultraconservative majority attempted to reject the election results this time around.

“We have a bunch of people up here who don’t believe in elections, and we have a few of our supervisors who could go along with that thinking and refuse to certify,” he said.

Garman said the county’s lawyer assures him that no matter how rancorous the debate, the vote by the county board is symbolic: all that matters is the registrar’s certification.

Secretary of State Shirley Weber confirmed that belief. She said her office is keeping a close watch on the situation in Shasta County, and is poised to send additional election monitors if dissent jeopardizes the vote.

“Thus far they’re doing a pretty good job,” Weber said Monday. “But there may be other [issues] that come up, and when they do, we’ll respond to them rather quickly.”

California gives county registrars 28 days — until Dec. 3 — to certify and publicly post local election results of presidential races. The deadline for other political contests is a few days later.

Those certified results go to the secretary of state, who has until Dec. 7 to certify the statewide result to the governor and presidential electors. Only New York, Oregon and Texas have later presidential certification deadlines.

Local board acceptance is immaterial in California and normally handled as a point of information. Some county boards may not even see the results until January, while in other counties it is bound to attract heated debate.

After the March primary, citizens appeared before the Orange County Board of Supervisors for an hour to allege illegal voting, political corruption and other “nefarious behavior.” At the end of that hour, the board accepted the registrar’s election report without discussion.