Decrease in voters at the polls; thousands of votes still to be tallied

By NATALIE HOFFMAN
Register Staff Writer

Napa County Registrar of Voters John Tuteur still has some counting to do, but said he doesn’t expect changes in the outcomes in any of the Feb. 5 races when his staff completes the tally.

With nearly 75 percent of the total vote counted, Tuteur estimates Napa County’s final voter turnout at a minimum of 59 percent. While he said local turnout usually runs 10 percent to 15 percent higher than the state average, a newer trend may surprise you — a mere 48 percent turnout for polling place voters using paper ballots.

While about 24,000 local voters had the option to cast paper votes at neighborhood polling places on Tuesday, he said, fewer than half did so, with the majority opting to vote by mail.

“Vote-by-mail voters are turning out between 10 and 15 percent higher (than polling place voters),” Tuteur said, adding that Napa County has the second-highest percentage of vote-by mail voters in California.

“We’re at 64 percent and Mendocino is a point ahead. ... And of the 30,098 ballots counted on election night, only about 175 were cast electronically.”

Tuteur estimated that between 5,000 and 12,000 vote-by-mail ballots have yet to be counted.

Although those votes could represent about a quarter of all ballots cast in the county, he said, the odds of these votes changing current election outcomes is small.

“It doesn’t make any statistical or logical sense that those votes would break any differently than the rest,” he said.

While the process of counting vote-by-mail ballots will resume Feb. 19, Tuteur said the bulk of the counting Tuesday went smoothly considering the increase in paper ballots, which take more time to count than votes that are cast electronically.

Tuteur cited two reasons for the seamless outcome. “First, there was not a great turnout of polling place voters. I was expecting 15,000,” he said.

The way vote-by-mail ballots were packaged also helped speed the counting process.

“Ballots in the mail come flat and the machine just flew them through. We did 10,365 between 8:45 p.m. and 11:45 p.m., but with folded ballots, it would have taken five hours,” he said.

Tuteur said he also has a great staff on his side — including four generations of volunteers.

“For the first time, we had staff from all of our divisions helping us. On elections staff — of course — did their usual wonderful job. But it was great having other members of our staff that came up from other divisions to help us with the voters that were waiting outside. We’ve never done that before and it was a great success.

Said Tuteur: “On St. Patrick’s Day, everyone is Irish — and on election day, all assessor-recorder employees are election workers.”

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