Uncle Sam is sad.
The maxim in OC is that 1/3 of the voters turn in their vote-by-mail ballots right away, 1/3 turn them in sometime over the course of the following few weeks, and the final third vote at the polls. I’m not sure whether that’s true, but more than one source has proclaimed it to me with the confidence suggesting that it’s conventional wisdom.
The numbers at the Registrar of Voters office as of last night showed the number of absentee ballots received through Saturday — roughly the ones that made it into Friday’s mail, meaning that there was only a week left (and people should leave more time than this Friday!) for people to turn in their the ballots. It’s a reasonable approximation of 50% of the total vote we would expect — maybe a little shy of that, but still informative — which some experts are forecasting may be as abysmally low as 40%. Of course, in some places (Laguna Woods, retirement sections of Seal Beach) a higher proportion of people vote absentee and in others (Santa Ana) I understand it to be lower.
Anyway, I ran some numbers last night to see how the return of absentee ballots was going. Here’s what I found:
I’m not surprised by the low figures for Santa Ana, but I am surprised by some of the others. I presume that the various campaigns are also running these numbers, though I haven’t been in contact with any about them. And, as with Groundhog’s Day, from these numbers we can forecast your future: one more week of blizzards of mailers and hurricanes of commercials, because in the biggest races people just hadn’t yet made up their minds. (And mail takes time to prepare and send.)
I was interested in tracking the 15 races that have entries into the column next to the city names. All of CA-46 (Loretta Sanchez’s district) has a return rate about that of Santa Ana, which contains up about 45% of the absentee ballots. That’s low, but not surprising. Santa Ana does have a contentious Mayoral race, though, and people may be awaiting more information about Pulido’s property swap scandal. Or perhaps I am being optimistic.
However, take a look at Anaheim: barely more than a point better than Santa Ana and over 4½ points under the county average. In case you think that return rates in South County and the central coast are inflating those numbers, take a look at AD-73 (Gabriella vs. Brough) and CA-48 (Rohrabacher vs. Savary): they aren’t; the central coast is about half a point above the county average and South County is almost a full point below. (We’ll come back to that one soon.) So Anaheim’s absentees, going into last weekend, were largely either delaying their votes or not planning to vote at all.
Next come two cities that I’d expect to have higher return rates by now — except for the nature of their campaigns. Costa Mesa is less than 2 points above Santa Ana and about 4 points below the county average. You can probably thank Jim Righeimer for that. GOTV becomes more important in that race, which doesn’t bode well for Riggy. Irvine is in some ways the nastiest city race of this cycle, and it is about a tenth of a point above Costa Mesa. Again, people are sitting it out for now — or altogether. Choi’s supposed to win easily here — but where are his absentees? See those numbers in Westminster and Garden Grove? That’s what Choi is supposed to be able to do with the Asian vote in Irvine. I’m not able to examine the voting rolls to look at East Asian majority precincts, but based on the overall figures it’s not happening.
Who else is lower than expected? AD-65 (Quirk-Silva vs. Young Kim), from whose voters I’ve heard complaints about the barrage of attack mailers on both sides, is pretty low. Fullerton itself, despite a pretty interesting Council race, is boosting the average a little — but not much. Anaheim is probably dragging it down a bit, but it’s still low overall. So those mailers and deceptive “Prop 13” ads probably aren’t going away soon.
I’m really surprised that AD-73 is so low. This wealthy, deep-red part of the county is a full point below the county average. Is there an explanation? The Congressional and State Senate races aren’t going to do much for it, but one might have expected the Supervisor’s race (Ming vs. Bartlett) and the Assembly race itself to bring people out. But Democrats and independents have little stake in the Supervisor’s race, and for Republicans it seems to be a bitter and unpleasant one. In the Assembly race, Democrats seem very enthused about Wendy Gabriella — who has been walking precincts like nobody’s business — and I keep hearing that Republicans are really, really not enthused about Bill Brough. They don’t want him there for 12 years, they don’t want him in party leadership, they don’t want him to run for higher office. They want to elect someone better, for what they hope may be a dozen years, in 2016. I feel that it would be foolish for me to predict an upset here — but you tell me: why is this area, which also has a whole lot of retirees, lagging so far behind? I have no better answer than “Bill Brough is uninspiring.”
SD-34’s being so low is probably just due to Santa Ana, because as you can see Garden Grove and especially Westminster are doing fine. (Fountain Valley, which you don’t see on the chart, is not far behind Westminster.) Huntington Beach is probably above the county average if you don’t count the Leisure Worlds. This does not bode well for Jose Solorio — and if Mario Guerra beats Tony Mendoza in SD-32 because of all the state party money spent on Solorio, I am going to … well, it will have to be something legal, so I can’t think of anything to say here right now.
It looks like two groups — retirees and the Vietnamese GOTV machine — are hitting on all cylinders. As for the rest: the main thing we know about negative campaigns is that they suppress turnout. Normally, that is supposed to help Republicans — but by-mail voters are disproportionately Republican, and they seem to be suppressed this year. So no one except for supporters of Janet Nguyen should be looking at these low ballot return figures and smiling. Much more than usual remains up in the air.
A finer-grained analysis, as well as one requiring better historical data (which is no longer available on the OCROV site), may lead to different conclusions, of course. Various people who sometimes correspond with me may have access to this data; they are welcome to chime in with comments or to contact me personally. But what I see for now is: nastier than usual races are suppressing early turnout in cities and districts where they occur.
In election participation / speed comparisons, you might also consider other factors besides candidate-related, ie, the number and ‘controversy’ of propositions, judicial appointments,etc. I may not be representative of any demographic, but that’s what held ME up.
The judicial votes are REALLY vexing, without easily available info except blind ratings by partisan groups or the Bar Association, and since those are binary (YES/NO) and not very qualitative (like a BREAKDOWN of the scoring for “qualified/not qualified, etc” ) it feels more like we are NOT voting, but merely “rubber stamping” an approval of “experts”, MUCH LIKE THE CITY AND COUNTY COUNCILS WE CRITICIZE.
With recent decisions from the bench having MORE CLOUT than those from the ballot box, it seems like TRUE “voter empowerment” would would provide MORE information for THOUGHTFUL CONSIDERATION of these votes, than is currently the case. I don’t know how that would be achieved, but I’m certainly interested in exploring a path.
Greg have you voted yet? If not, what race are you waiting to make a final decision?
I stopped in the ROV last week and cast my ballot.
I mailed in my ballot yesterday. The last race I came to a decision about was School Board.
Slight correction. Of those that request a vote by mail ballot, about 40% turn them in right away, about 10% to 20 % for the rest of the are either carried into the polls or mailed in the last couple of days. A company called Political Data keeps track of the return rate and that is what their results have been across the state. More people are applying for Mail ballots, but most still hold on to them until the very end of the campaign.
Thanks, Ted. The OCROV shows that 784,373 of 1,424,216 people (747,614 of them Permanent Absentee Voters), or just over 55%, are eligible to cast absentee ballots in OC in this election. I have been told (by the same sorts of people who have told me the 1/3, 1/3, 1/3 rule, of which I suppose this is part) that 2/3 of the vote ends up being cast by mail. Is that your sense?
I’m having a little trouble parsing your sentence. For example, I’m not sure if you’re saying that 50-60% of absentee voters are expected to vote at all — which seems about right. But my problem understanding it goes beyond that.
Roughly speaking, by-mail voters who try to vote can be classified in one of six groups: people who (1) turn it in right away; (2) turn it in later that right away but before the last couple of days; (3) turn it in during the last couple of days and they count (which I believe are called “Late Absentees” by the Registrar); (4) turn it in during the last couple of days but it arrives too late to count; (5) drop it off at the polls; (6) surrender it at the polls and vote in the booth. I get that 40% (of this 55% in OC, meaning 22%) supposedly turn it in right away; that didn’t seem to happen here this year. Even generously extending “right away” to ballots arriving by Oct. 17, that’s only 43,716. Between Oct. 20-28, 125,945 more have arrived. Even the current (10/28) total of 169,661 returned is only 21.63% of the more than 784,000 by-mail voters.
If that number is really supposed to be up near 40% of 784,000 (i.e., 313,600) then we’re running at about 54% of what it should be, even despite generously construing ballots arriving by 10/28 as having been “turned in right away.” Either that’s a really big story or I’m misinterpreting your sentence.
Do you know of publicly available links to PDI reports that spell this out?
Contentious how?
The mayors race is the LEAST “contentious” (and important) to 9270X voters. It’s everybody else who is freaking out. MMJ and SAUSD rank way higher in my part of the “hood”.
while I appreciate that you all are north orange county centric (with the exception of costa mesa) there are two sets of races in south county that say as much about the problems within the republican party as they do about the larger issue of where is this county going.
in the fifth supervisorial race, you have lisa bartlett v robert ming. and while bartlett may represent al that you think is wrong with the established republican party in this county, the election of ming would make lisa’s frailties look like brave principals. ming is supported by the bealls and the other hard core right wing tea party disciples. this basically means that there is no room for compromise, no room for ideas and concepts outside of the narrow doctrine regurgitated by their followers. if ming wins, the republican party will become more dysfunctional than it already is and will destroy any opportunity the republicans have of reviving the party. furthermore, education will become doctrinaire, arts and culture will cease to exist and politics will devolve into an even greater morass than it currently is.
in newport beach, the dave ellis team (need I say more) is running on an ignorant, destructive, devisive platform of blowing up city hall, killing the rabbits in the sculpture garden and curtailing everything positive that the city government has done.
government is about more than just fixing potholes and deregulation. government is about building community and providing opportunities albeit economic, educational or cultural to the inhabitants of that community. Mr. Peotter and his cronies want to transform newport beach into stanton. we live here because we do not want to live in stanton. and if that is what mr peotter and his friends want, they should move to stanton and not try to impose that lifestyle and philosophy on the residents of newport beach.
there is a real battle going on in south county about who we are and what we want to be. you all should be covering it.
Hey I thought you were supposed to be a funny guy.
Fascinating stuff. Please explain what you mean by the Stanton reference.
PS I’ve been writing mostly about Huntington Beach lately, which ain’t north county.
the ability to be funny resides, in part, on having a safe and secure environment from which to spout one’s stupidity. those three yahoos truly scare me.
stanton, while i do believe does have a tommy’s, is not newport beach. it is a different city with a different population with different resources and different needs.
while not trying to sound too elitist, newport beach is something special and unique. we strive to be special and unique as opposed to simply middle class
rush, tim and mike should win on tuesday, the rabbits at city hall will be safe and i will go back to trying to be funny
We’ve covered Newport Beach in the Voter Guide, where we’ve taken away tentative endorsements after learning that certain candidates were part of the Dave Ellis group. But we need writers embedded in the area to do more; we can only do so much.
As for the Fifth Supe District: we endorsed Bartlett over Ming for pretty much the reasons you suggest — although, here again, having people step up and contribute stories that buttress what you’re saying would help. I’d love to see informed people who could write about those sorts of battles.
(We’ve also covered Irvine a lot, which isn’t North County, as well as AD-73. And, of course, Vern’s Huntington Beach isn’t exactly “north.”)
agree, but you gotta remember, and if i do not remind you, the winships will, we here in newport need the attention
well, the yacht is in drydock for a few days, let me see what i can do