Today is the last day to register online to vote in California
OAKLAND, Calif. - Election Day is 15 days away but voting in the 2020 election is well under way.
Ballots are being cast across the Bay Area in a presidential election already seeing record voter registration and high early turnout.
"Everybody complains but not enough people vote. You can't complain unless you vote," said voter Steven Cox of Morgan Hill.
Monday marks the deadline to register to vote if you want a vote-by-mail ballot.
At the Santa Clara County Registrar's office Monday, several first-time voters cast their ballots in-person including Juan Pablo Quinonez Weston who is originally from Peru and became a U.S. citizen last year.
"It's huge because now I can express my voice and I can express my support," said Weston.
Sarah Cerda of San Jose also voted for the first time Monday, even though she wasn't planning to.
"I was just planning on turning in my registration form and I just decided to go for today since I'm already here," said Cerda.
Processing of early ballots is also under way.
Masked employees are handling tens of thousands of vote-by-mail ballots already returned.
"Early voting...we have 191,000 just in our county that have voted already and it's about 10 times it was in the last election," said Evelyn Mendez with the Santa Clara County Registrar's Office. "So the numbers are really high."
As for voter registration in Santa Clara County, 67% of eligible voters registered in the 2016 presidential election..
As of Monday, 84% of eligible voters had registered so far.
For the first time ever, the county registered more than 1 million voters.
"A lot of the counties are experiencing high-volume. So this number of high-volume voters and even high-volume people registering is across the state," said Mendez.
In Contra Costa County, the Registrar of Voters Debi Cooper also expects to hit record voter registration this election.
"We are on the brink of going over 700,000 voters for the first time in history. We're about 2,000 voters away and we think we'll probably get there," Cooper said Monday.
She says the vote-by-mail ballots returned have already hit historic levels with numbers higher than the 2016 presidential election.
"On the day before election day, we only had 146,000 vote-by-mail ballots in house. We are going to go over 200,000 today and we still have 2 more weeks to go before the election," Cooper said Monday.
If you don't fill out your registration online or have it postmarked by Monday, the Santa Clara County Elections Office says you can go to the registrar’s office starting Tuesday to fill out a provisional registration and ballot.
Or do that at voting centers when they open October 31.