Napa County Registrar of Voters John Tuteur’s plans are falling into place.

After a November 2006 debacle in which some voters were turned away from congested polling places, Tuteur spent 2007 launching initiatives designed to convert polling place voters into vote-by-mail voters.

The most recent effort was a direct mail campaign Tuteur announced in November. He sent a letter to some 12,000 registered voters in Napa County, informing them that their polling places would be shut down and their precincts had been turned into vote-by-mail areas.

The shift, in 41 precincts, affects nearly 20 percent of the county’s potential voters.

Why did he make the move? Tuteur said he needed to find a way to reduce congestion at the polls. The answer was to latch onto a growing West Coast trend — vote by mail.

By reducing the number of polling places and encouraging voters to mail in ballots, Tuteur expects at the very least that polling booths from deactivated districts can be used at the remaining election-day locations. More booths mean less waiting of the kind that turned people away from the polls in November 2006.

 (Tuteur’s explains his reasoning in a Your Turn commentary on page B3.)

Napa County may be one of the heaviest vote-by-mail counties in the state, according to Tuteur. Some 60 percent of the county’s voters vote by mail.

About 19 percent, however, have been forced into it.

A state rule allows registrars of voters to forcibly convert polling place districts into a vote-by-mail districts if all but 250 or fewer voters in the district have volunteered to vote by mail.

Those forced into voting by mail do not pay postage on their ballots and have the option of turning their ballots in — signed and sealed — at any county polling place on election day by 8 p.m.

Napa County has a total of 85 vote by mail precincts, including 41 Tuteur recently decided to shutter.

Tuteur said 29 of those 41 recently closed were in the city of Napa. Four out of five polling places in Calistoga were closed, Yountville closed one, St. Helena closed one and the rest were in the unincorporated part of county. Some vote-by-mail precincts have been carved out of pieces of existing precincts.

Tuteur left one polling place open — for now — at the Veterans Home of California at Yountville because of concerns among the elder veterans that they would not be able to get to a convenient polling place.

“Some of the veterans felt that was easier for them than (voting) by mail,” Tuteur said.

The change is brewing controversy, especially among those who believe removing the polling places disenfranchises voters who would prefer to wait until election day to cast their ballots. Tuteur said he heard from about 30 residents after he notified the 12,000 voters of the shift.

One, Linda Brown, wrote a letter to the Register raising her concerns. “There are often 20 or more ballot initiatives and dozens of candidates on any given ballot,” Brown wrote in a Dec. 19 letter. “Voters should have the right to study these issues and options up to election day. Often some of the most important information does not emerge until the very end of the race.”

While Tuteur disagrees with Brown about disenfranchisement, he said he whole-heartedly agrees when it comes to voting strategy.

“That’s one of the primary concerns I had,” he said. “I don’t want to vote a week in advance. I want to hear all the last-minute arguments and see what’s in the media.”