While many settled in to keep an eye on their TVs or computers to monitor coverage of the 2008 presidential primary election, dozens of local voters filed into the Napa County Elections Office just before 8 p.m. Tuesday to fulfill their civic duty.

Around 50 voters completed their ballots while standing against the white walls in the third floor hallways of the elections office. Others waited patiently in the office's nondescript, plastic office chairs. The office buzzed as voters posed questions to elections staff.

At the 8 p.m. deadline, Napa County Registrar of Voters John Tuteur closed the doors to the public. "Whoever is in now can stay in!" he bellowed.

Denise Oswald, a Napa County voter who came to the office after losing her ballot, said the process went off without a hitch — even for last-minute voters.

"It was very easy and I waited less than five minutes," she said.

Napa resident Colleen Watkins said she brought her daughter, Lisa Jaynes, to the registrar's office because her usual polling place was closed this year. Tuteur shuttered about 40 polling places this year, pushing many voters into using vote-by-mail ballots.

While long lines were anticipated at some polling places, few materialized.

Like Oswald, Jaynes said the wait was minimal and election workers were available to answer all of her questions.

As the last of the voters departed shortly after 8 p.m., elections volunteers waited in the early evening chill in a Copia parking lot. Fred Gress, one of the volunteers, said the area is a relay station for a steady stream of vehicles that carry ballots from the county's 58 polling places. Gress said the system was set up to avoid traffic congestion on the downtown stretch of First Street where the registrar's office is.

The first of dozens of vehicles — a silver SUV — pulled up around 8:30 p.m.

Tuteur said although the elections office didn't encounter any major snags this year, 64 percent of ballots were paper — a change from previous years. That fact inevitably slowed down the counting process.

Napa County has 65,960 registered voters, he said, and while he said it was too early on Tuesday evening to pinpoint voter turnout this election, he said Napa County usually exceeds the average statewide turnout by 10 or 15 percent.

Some 19,617 vote-by-mail ballots were counted by about 8:30 p.m. Tuesday. Although some people who vote by mail worry that their votes aren't counted, Tuteur stressed that Tuesday evening's early results were all from vote-by-mail ballots.

Tuteur said the counting process was also slower this year because of the decrease in voting machines at polling places. In the last election, he said, results from 318 cartridges from the machines were tallied. This year, there were only 58. "It has been five years since we've used paper ballots," Tuteur said.



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