CALIFORNIA FOCUS
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, DECEMBER 4, 2015, OR THEREAFTER
FOR RELEASE: FRIDAY, DECEMBER 4, 2015, OR THEREAFTER
BY THOMAS D. ELIAS
“SAN MATEO SHOWS LIKELY FUTURE OF CALIFORNIA VOTING”
At about 8:05 p.m. Nov. 3, anyone in
San Mateo County who cared knew that its (almost) all-mail election was a
resounding success.
That’s when the county published the
results from 68,988 ballots which arrived by mail before that Election Day
began. The election wasn’t completely over, but those votes amounted to
just over 75 percent of all ballots cast in the county, where turnout was up by
just over 3 percent from two years earlier. At that time, mail ballots went
only to voters who requested them and just 25 percent of those eligible
actually voted.
Even then, mail ballots accounted for
77 percent of the votes cast in 2013. This fall, with what used to be called
“absentee” ballots sent to every registered voter in the county, mail votes
accounted for fully 97 percent of the total of 96,200 cast. Just 2,133 live
votes were cast in a handful of locations around the county where voting
machines were available to anyone who wanted them for several weeks before
Election Day.
The same sort of thing happened in two
similar all-mail elections in Yolo County in 2013, when vote totals did not
change much from previously, but there were significant cost savings.
In San Mateo County, all this
precluded any late-night tension on Election Night. It was over almost before
it started. By the time three-quarters
of the votes are counted on the usual Election Night, most candidates have
long-since given victory speeches or conceded. Only unusually tight races drag
on into the night.
That was not going to happen in San
Mateo County, where final results awaited the 25,000-odd ballots carrying
postmarks of Nov. 3 or earlier, but didn’t reach the county voting
registrar before Election Day. Those results weren’t completely added in to the
final totals until nine days after the election, so there wasn’t much point in
anyone staying up deep into the night.
It was all part of a three-year
experiment that will be suspended for the presidential election year of 2016,
but resume two years from now with the next off-year elections.
The early readings on this trial are
all positive. Not only was participation up among registered voters, but the
actual number of ballots cast rose by about 15,000 from the average of the previous
three elections.
Then there were costs – way down. Not
only did the county save on renting space for polling places, but there was no
need for pre-election testing of the more than 1,000 voting machines usually
deployed. And there were no more than the usual number of mismarked ballots.
“Voting by mail is not really complicated,” Mark Church, the county clerk and
registrar, told a reporter.
What about fraud, the big fear
expressed by skeptics who have long feared that marking ballots at home, at work
or wherever people like can lead to pressure on voters and other forms of
coercion? So far, there are no reports of any such problems, just as that sort
of problem has been rare since the late 1970s, when mail ballots became
available to all voters, not just those planning to be absent on Election Day.
Monetary savings came from needing
only 32 “universal” polling stations, where anyone registered in the county
could vote regardless of home address. These replaced the more than 200 polling
places used in other recent elections, even elections that saw mail ballots
account for three-quarters of the vote. Fewer polling places meant less need to
deploy trucks, saving more money. It also reduced the need for one-day poll
workers from the previous 1,700 to about 150, saving between $148 and $180 for
each worker not hired, an approximate savings of about $250,000.
The bottom line here is that elections
will cost less in the future, they will be conducted mostly in homes, where
voters can examine sample ballots and ballot proposition booklets at leisure
while they vote. This was already happening to a large extent: Last year’s
statewide primary saw 69 percent of all votes cast by mail.
One good thing is that this will soon
cause most counties to get rid of the vast majority of voting machines, long
controversial because of tampering fears.
And that means future voting will be
done earlier and earlier, forcing frontloaded campaigns at every level.
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Email
Thomas Elias at tdelias@aol.com. His book, "The Burzynski Breakthrough,
The Most Promising Cancer Treatment and the Government’s Campaign to Squelch
It," is now available in a soft cover fourth edition. For more Elias
columns, visit www.californiafocus.net
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