Elections Departments Rush to Prepare for Calif. Recall
Saturday, October 04, 2003
SACRAMENTO, Calif. — County elections departments are rushing toward their historic rendezvous with California voters, and most predict a smooth count shadowed by fears of a Florida-style debacle.
Across the state, registrars are training poll workers, processing absentee ballots and preparing for a massive voter turnout beginning at 7 a.m. Tuesday.
It's among the final acts of a 2 1/2 month, $55 million drive to conduct a special election in record time, one that has survived court challenges on outdated punch-card voting systems (search) and other issues.
On Thursday, the California secretary of state's office reported a record number of voters for a gubernatorial race — 15,380,526 — have registered for the Oct. 7 election to recall Gov. Gray Davis (search).
More than 3 million voters have requested absentee ballots, and returned almost half of them completed to counties, said Terri Carbaugh, spokeswoman for Secretary of State Kevin Shelley. Once the ballots are in, the voters cannot change their minds.
Voters across the state's 58 counties face a ballot with 135 candidates for the office of governor and possibilities for penning in another 28 official write-in candidates.
Contra Costa County Clerk Stephen Weir, a statewide spokesman for elections officials, predicted Thursday that turnout among registered voters will be higher than last November's 50.5 percent that elected Gov. Gray Davis to a second term, but less than the state's 71 percent turnout for the 2000 presidential race.
Despite frequent comparisons to Florida's presidential election debacle in 2000, California registrars predict that unless Tuesday's election is close, counting shouldn't be difficult.
"We're just not experiencing any problems that are out of the ordinary for a major election like this," said Kristin Heffron, chief deputy registrar of Los Angeles County.
Democrats, fearful of losing a sitting governor in the first year of his second term, are soliciting $100,000 for a "No More Floridas (search)" campaign to scrutinize alleged violations during and after Tuesday's vote.
But Carbaugh said a Florida scenario is unlikely, adding that California has statewide standards for what constitutes a vote rather than Florida's county-by-country standards.
Counties also have a 28-day period to complete the election count, compared to Florida's seven days during the 2000 election, while the secretary of state has 39 days to certify the outcome.
Still, Weir said, a close election-night outcome could take days or weeks to sort out. He said 11 percent of the vote in November 2002 wasn't counted on election night, while 1.2 million California votes went uncounted on election night in the November 2000 presidential race. |
