Melissa Kaplan's
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Last updated April 19, 2007

Final tally of county votes moves ahead

Results not expected for at least 10 days as workers pore over thousands of absentee, provisional ballots

Michael Coit, Press Democrat, 11/15/2002

"We're trying to get done by Thanksgiving," said Janice Atkinson, the county's deputy registrar of voters.

Although the outcome of several contests is at stake, observers said watching the painstaking process of counting ballots is tedious.

Heavy, rectangular brown boxes packed with ballots are taken from shelves and emptied into machines known as card readers. While the machines can count 1,000 a minute, the actual speed is much slower because they stop automatically for workers to check blank ballots and ballots with write-in candidates.

While the main tally of about 147,000 ballots should be done in about a week, elections workers will need another couple of days to verify, sort and count another 1,800 provisional ballots.

"These people are very professional. I expected it," said Sean Webb, a retired auditor-assessor from Sebastopol who has spent several days observing the count on behalf of Steve Westly, the Democratic candidate for state controller.

Yet watching elections workers complete tasks over hours at a time is "about as interesting as watching the grass grow," Webb said.

It always takes a few weeks after the election to complete the official canvass but a combination of close races and absentee ballots has made for greater scrutiny of this year's tally.

More than 48,000 absentee ballots were mailed or dropped off at the election office in time to be counted Election Day. But another 23,000 absentee ballots -- nearly double the number in recent general elections -- were turned in on Election Day.

The total of more than 71,000 absentee ballots compares to 56,000 two years ago and accounted for almost half of all votes cast in Sonoma County.

"We were really hit with a lot of ballots," said Debra Russotti, elections services supervisor.

While absentee voting has increased, the number surged this year because of a new state law that allows voters to permanently register as absentees.

The county nearly tripled its elections work force to handle the increased volume.

A crew still weary from election night began working on the second batch of absentee ballots the next morning.

Removing and recording ballots, verifying signatures with computer records, sorting by coded voting districts, all while ensuring voter anonymity, workers processed them all by the end of Wednesday.

They are being tallied together with the ballots that already were counted.

"It's all about checks and balances, making sure every ballot got counted," Atkinson said.

All of the ballots are locked inside a large room in the county elections office that began buzzing with activity Thursday.

One group of five workers ran ballots through the vote tabulating machine. They frequently stopped to pull out ballot cards left blank -- most often those containing judicial contests -- because they can't be read by the machine. Another pair watched computer screens for ballots with write-in candidates.

Two other workers marked duplicate ballots to replace those that were damaged or marked in pencil, which also can't be read by the machine.

And a final pair tallied write-in candidates.

In two other rooms, workers are tallying some ballots by hand to double-check the machine count.

The process will end with the tally of 1,800 provisional ballots cast by people whose names weren't on voter lists or had received an absentee ballot at home but went to a polling place instead.

Many observers have targeted that portion of the election. Webb said it could be the most interesting part of the count him even though the number of potential votes is small.

"Those are the most questionable ballots, ones with the greatest potential for problems," he said.

Atkinson said she just wants to get to the provisional ballots as soon as she can. "This is going to be the canvass that never ends," she said.