Voter turnout best in 30 years

By COLBY FRAZIER — Nov. 5, 2009

An election season that was marked by big-money campaigns, floods of controversial attack ads and one of the most divisive charter amendments in recent history will also be remembered for drawing the largest voter turnout in a city municipal election in nearly three decades.

With just over 200 ballots remaining to be counted last night, unofficial election results showed 48.95 percent of the city’s 46,718 registered voters cast ballots, numbers not seen since President Jimmy Carter was living in the White House.

The city’s odd-year municipal elections have long drawn flimsy crowds, averaging about 38 percent since the early 1980s. Rare spikes in voter turnout occur when the state hosts a special odd-year election. In such instances, citywide turnout sometimes jumped beyond 51 percent.

But this election featured only city candidates and ballot measures. And yet, voter turnout jumped significantly over the lowly 37 percent that turned out in 2007, a statistic that has city elections officials thrilled.

“We definitely surpassed every expectation,” said Marcelo Lopez, the city’s director of administrative services. “We’re in a good spot. We’re very, very pleased.”

While increased voter turnout tends to put a smile on any election watcher’s face, this year’s jump is especially pleasing for some. This was the city’s first vote-by-mail election. Ballots were mailed on Oct. 5, and on the eve of the election, the city had already received nearly 18,000 ballots, nearly 1,000 more than in 2007.

On election day, rather than polling places, the city staffed a mere seven ballot drop-off locations, where residents who procrastinated or forgot to drop their ballot in the mail, or simply wanted to hand it over to a human being, could cast a ballot.

The election results showed 4,467 ballots were deposited on election day at drop-off locations, while an additional 650 were received by mail.

The large number of ballots received prior to election day allowed city officials on Tuesday night to quickly process nearly 18,000 votes. When these numbers hit the projector screen at City Hall, many candidates instantly knew the fate of their political dreams.

But of course, there were exceptions.

Over night, as a couple thousand ballots were counted, the third and fourth place finishers in the race for four open City Council seats switched. Normally this wouldn’t be important, as long as four seats are available. But because the fourth open seat was made available by council member Helene Schneider, who won the mayor’s seat and is only two year’s into her current term, it means whoever winds up in the fourth chair will have to seek reelection in two years rather than four.

On Tuesday night, Frank Hotchkiss went to bed in fourth place, hoping he could make up the 48 votes separating him and Michael Self. He got his wish, but as of last night, he led Self by a mere 15 votes, too few to be sure since nearly 200 provisional ballots have yet to be counted.

On election night, Measure B, a city charter amendment that would have lowered building heights in much of the city from 60 feet to 45 feet, was being defeated by less than 500 votes, a margin too narrow to declare the measure dead.

Last-minute voters, however, overwhelmingly shot down the measure. As of last night, Measure B was 1,666 votes short of being approved.

The big election day turnout slowed the ballot counting process slightly, but Lopez said election staff worked into the wee hours to ensure updated results were available yesterday morning.

He said the higher voter turnout could be attributed to a number of factors, including the controversy surrounding Measure B, a large number of seats up for grabs, and the vast amount of cash poured into various campaigns by Texan Randall Van Wolfswinkel, much of which was spent on advertisements, which if nothing else, piqued people’s interest in the election.

“We got slammed with an avalanche of votes and that took a long time to count,” Lopez said. “This is what it’s all about, democracy at its best.”

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after 11/3 : 11/5/2009

It would be interesting to know how many ballots came in by mail (or otherwise) after the deadline. Could you get that and publicise it? Also, it would be interesting to know how many ballots had the small ovals BELOW the mayoral candidates marked. It seemed to me very close and, for a moment, I was concerned I didn't mark the right one.

city voter

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Cost of Vote-By-Mail? : 11/5/2009

It would be interesting to know how much money the City saved by implementing the Vote-by-Mail process.

SBer1957

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Another Cost Thought : 11/5/2009

It would be interesting to know how much money the City could have saved if residents voted differently.

SB Burden

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