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STOCKTON, Calif. — It's Veteran's Day, nearly a week after election day, and San Joaquin County's Registrar of Voters still has more than 100,000 votes left to report. In effort to finish the counts, Registrar Melinda Dubroff decided to keep the office open through weekend.
Inside, a group of veterans traded their holiday for counting ballots instead. Marice Taylor was one of those vets.
"When you’re in the military, there’s no days off, you don’t get Veterans Day off, you have to work," said Taylor, an elections technician and Army veteran said.
Taylor spent six years serving in the Army, and he said he has never quite spent a Veterans Day like this.
“We run it through on the first pass to capture the signatures," Taylor said, describing the process of counting votes. "And then it moves from here, from the database here to that other room where the verify the signatures."
ABC10 spoke with three different veterans who traded their holiday usually celebrated with parades, food and family, for counting these ballots instead.
"This is another facet of us participating in the democratic process here in the United States," said Jimshed Akhtar, an election technician assistant and U.S. Air Force veteran said. "[It's] extremely important. I have great pride in doing it."
William Winter, an election assistant and retired Army National Guard veteran, agreed.
“I have, one could say, nothing better to do," Winter said. "And I figured, why not give something back to my country, the country's given a lot to me and my family and friends, so I'm honored to do this."
Dubroff made the optional decision to keep her office open through Veterans Day weekend, as she still had more than 100,000 votes left to report as of Monday morning.
“Some counties are not working," Dubroff said, "but with the amount of ballots we still need to count and people are really motivated to get this work done, so we definitely wanted to stay open."
The veterans counting ballot after ballot after ballot were taking this duty just as seriously as their last.
“There’s a lot of countries that this opportunity is not available and I think sometimes," Taylor began, "once you’re in the military and you go to some of these places and you see what has to happen in order for people to vote, it makes you appreciate it more and it makes you want to fight for everybody’s vote to be counted."
This falls within District 10, a heated race for a congressional seat between Jeff Denham and Josh Harder. As of Monday evening, Democrat Josh Harder was ahead of incumbent Republican Jeff Denham by 3,447 votes.