Bishop - Ballots still to be counted in Inyo

A Lone Pine resident votes Tuesday at Statham Hall in Lone Pine. Because voters were using paper ballots, the Inyo County Elections Office and its volunteers were faced with extra long hours in the prelimary counting process. Photo by Mike Gervais

1-7-2008

Despite facing long hours of work on Tuesday, Inyo County election officials reported a relatively smooth process occured for both voters and those supporting the election process.

As of Wednesday morning, there were still about 1,000 ballots that remained to be counted from Inyo’s “Super Tuesday” contribution.
“It was just about 1 a.m. when we were able to call it a night,” Inyo County Clerk-Recorder and Registrar of Voters Mary A. Roper said. “We had gone through 5,122 ballots cast, out of a pool of registered Inyo voters that totals 9,946. So, we were seeing nearly a 52 percent participation rate at that point.”
Taking into account those still-to-be tallied votes, Inyo’s percentage of voter participation will climb higher. “There were 683 absentee ballots submitted at polling locations yesterday,” Roper said, “along with 61 provisional ballots, plus there are mail-in ballots that have arrived since Saturday when we ‘closed our books’ on the mail-in votes we’d received as of Friday afternoon … so once those ballots have been counted, that’ll up the participation percentage among Inyo County voters. We’re always among the highest California counties in terms of voter turnout.”

Independence election volunteer Nancy Masters hauls sealed ballot bags from Big Pine into the Inyo County Elections Office late Tuesday night. The sealed bags are always accompanied by at least two people on their journey from the polling place to the counting room. Photo by Mike Gervais

Those visiting the polls on Tuesday were voting with paper ballots, the voting mechanism put in place following California Secretary of State Debra Bowen’s decertification of touch-screen voting machines that were in use during the last election.
Inyo’s top election official explained she knew going back to the low-tech paper ballots would add time to determining voting results. “When California decided against the use of the electronic voting machines,” Roper said, “it was clear the process of getting all our ballots counted was going to take longer.”
California’s decision regarding the use of the electronic voting machines, explained Roper, resulted from issues that were raised related to the integrity and security of the system. “When they (California elections officials) have answered those questions,” said Roper, “I expect to be using them once again.”
Roper explained that, “with the paper ballots the state used this time, it wasn’t as fast as in the past. We used to have those punched-out ‘IBM-type cards’ that could be run through a counter in large batches. With this election’s paper version, one person had to slip each ballot through a scanner, one-at-a-time.”
Due to the vast expanse of Inyo County’s less-populated areas, with relatively few residents scattered across significant distances, voters outside Inyo’s larger communities were all issued mail-in ballots. “This has its advantages,” Roper said, “most people get their mail-in’s to us on time … and vote-by-mail folks have a higher percentage ‘turn-out’ than poll-voters.
Support for making sure mail-in ballots were timely-received and properly counted wasn’t left entirely to poll workers and mail carriers, either. “There was even an Inyo County Sheriff’s Office deputy that gathered up the ballots that had been left in a locked box we had available in Tecopa – he collected them at exactly 8 p.m. when all the other polls closed and drove them directly here to the courthouse … and someone from the Independence Post Office actually brought us a couple of ballots that had been placed in the ‘Local Slot’ so we’d get them on time.”
Roper indicated she would again be encouraging Inyo voters to opt for using a mail-in ballot for the upcoming election on June 3, 2008. “It’ll be really important in June,” said Roper, “because there will be contested local races and important state races, too. We’re expecting an even higher voter turnout than usual.”
The Inyo Elections Office is in the process of finishing its count of the outstanding ballots. It will be another couple of days before “final-final” results are published, explained Roper.