Young voters in every Bay Area county are returning ballots at rates that dwarf their 2022 pace — and the private data firm tracking the surge calls the spike "kind of crazy."
What the establishment press celebrates as civic engagement looks more like the industrialization of ballot collection in one-party jurisdictions. California's universal mail-in voting and legal ballot harvesting have built an infrastructure where organized collection drives can juice return rates among targeted demographics — and every cycle, the machine gets more efficient, making competitive elections structurally impossible.
According to Political Data Inc., a private voter-data firm that compiles county records, voters ages 18 to 34 in all nine Bay Area counties were returning ballots at a faster clip than at the same point in the last midterm. In Contra Costa County, the return rate for that group hit roughly 34% two days after Election Day — up from 21% at the same point in 2022, a 13-point jump. In Solano County, the young-voter return rate climbed from 24.3% to 33%, even as the countywide rate barely moved, stuck at about 48%. Meanwhile, the return rate for voters 65 and older in Solano actually fell, from 71.9% to 66.6%.
PDI vice president Paul Mitchell said he saw a "big spike in young people" returning ballots and an "even bigger spike in Latinos." Among voters PDI identified as likely Latino — a category the firm estimates using surnames, birthplace, ballot language and geography, not self-reported data — return rates were ahead of 2022 in all nine counties. In Alameda County, the Latino return rate surged from 28.1% to 41.6%. In Contra Costa, it jumped from 28.1% to 45.4%.
The Press Democrat framed the data as a youth-turnout story. Fortune framed it as Gen Z breaking for Democrats 66% to 31% in House races, citing CIRCLE, a Tufts University research group. Both outlets treated the surge as organic civic participation. Neither examined the infrastructure that makes double-digit jumps in targeted demographics possible between one cycle and the next.
California sends every registered voter a mail-in ballot. State law permits ballot harvesting — any person can collect and return a voted ballot on behalf of another voter. In one-party jurisdictions where Republican opposition is functionally nonexistent, organized collection operations face no counterweight. The demographics showing the sharpest jumps in return rates are the same demographics that break heaviest for Democrats: CIRCLE's data shows 71% of young Latino voters and 70% of young women voted Democratic in House races.
PDI's Mitchell noted that counties report on different schedules and that complete voter histories — the kind that would show how ballots were collected and returned — won't be available for roughly two months, well after certification. The data driving the headlines now is partial and preliminary. What the full histories will reveal about the machinery behind the numbers is a question the press isn't asking.
