Posted on 11/04/2007 10:58:32 AM PST by granite
Each morning, four clerks take their seats at computers in the San Bernardino County registrar of voters office and reach for trays crammed with lavender envelopes.
They'll spend the day there, checking absentee ballots and calling up digital images of voter signatures to verify that the ballots are genuine. They check about 6,000 a day.
The hushed workroom in the back of a cavernous registrar's warehouse may lack the flurry of election night at a neighborhood polling place, but it is dramatically changing San Bernardino elections.
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Steven Lewis / The Press-Enterprise Virginia Cooper stacks mail-in ballots while verifying signatures Wednesday at the county registrar of voters office in San Bernardino. Candidates are altering their campaign tactics to make sure they've gotten the word out to voters who mail in absentee ballots. Between Oct. 16 and 26, San Bernardino city voters sent in nearly 4,100 absentee ballots, a 25 percent increase over mail-in voting a decade ago and 11 percent more than the last time voters decided on the positions at stake Tuesday.
Veteran politicians and consultants say that is changing the way elections are waged in town, from lengthening campaigns to narrowing opportunities for mudslinging.
City Attorney Jim Penman, seeking election to a fifth term this fall, said political hopefuls ordinarily start walking precincts in August or September. But this time, partly out of a wish to persuade absentee voters in time, Penman started in May.
In a poll that Penman commissioned, 42.5 percent of respondents said they planned to vote by mail. He expects the ratio of mail-in ballots to continue to rise.
"I enjoy going to the polls," he said. "It's kind of a patriotic feeling. But I work in town, and my polling place is only a few blocks from my house. If I worked in Los Angeles or Orange County as many voters here do, absentee voting would be really attractive to me."
Political consultant Rick Taylor, who advised former Mayor Judith Valles in her victorious 1998 campaign, said candidates help drive the trend.
"When you see a significant increase, it's usually because at least one of the campaigns is making an intensive effort for those votes," he said.
Fourth Ward Councilman Neil Derry, last re-elected in November 2005, said demographic patterns are changing as well. The conventional wisdom used to be that the older conservative Republicans voted by mail and the young Democrats went to the polls, Derry said. Now, he said, the absentee vote tends to mirror the broad spectrum of the electorate.
Many absentee voters send in their ballots in early October, shortly after the registrar's office sends them out. Derry said that has changed the character of local campaigns.
He said a traditional tactic was to launch hit mailers to arrive on the Saturday before Election Day. Before the target would have time to respond or the media could determine the source of the smear, the votes would be counted.
"Now, if a candidate wants to hit somebody, he has to do it early," Derry said. "That gives the other candidate a chance to respond. So this is all good for democracy."
Reach Chris Richard at 909-806-3076 or crichard@PE.com
Absentee ballots are the favorite tactic of vote fraud scammers using non-existent, phantom voter registrations. Higher turnout? How many are real? A spot check or sampling of people on the voter rolls will tell you how many are phantoms. In the 1996 election in Bob Dornan’s district, I canvassed 200 voters by going to their homes and discovered that 50% (!!!) did not exist. Of course, he lost to the democrat.
In my precinct, as well as many other rural areas in California absentee voting is the only option, as we have no polling place.
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