Low voter turnout keeps election quiet

BY COLBY FRAZIER
DAILY SOUND STAFF WRITER

The statewide primary election yesterday ended up about how Santa Barbara County election officials believed it would: low voter turnout across the board.
With 75 percent of precincts counted at press deadline, only 29.5 percent, or 55,619 of the county’s 188,277 registered voters, had cast ballots.
The lackluster turnout is widely attributed to the presidential primary being bumped up to Feb. 5 this year. As a result, yesterday’s ballots lacked the draw of big names like Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sen. Barack Obama, which made for quiet polling places throughout the day.

“Turnout is about what we expected,” said County Clerk, Recorder and Assessor Joseph Holland. “It’s not unexpected that you would have lower turnout.”
Holland said vote-by-mail ballots, which are generally a good indicator of how strong election turnout will be, were also low, with 40,800 compared to more than 50,000 received in February.
The lack of voters at the poles yesterday was in stark contrast to the Feb. 5 presidential primary, which drew 66 percent of the county’s voters to the polls. The only other time local voter turnout during a primary was that high, Holland said, came during the 1976 presidential primary.
Though 66 percent is a laudable number by most counts, Holland said during the 2004 general election, 80.5 percent of county voters cast ballots, which was also comparable to the 1976 election. The 1976 election saw Jimmy Carter narrowly defeat incumbent Gerald Ford.
When asked why the statewide primary did not follow the presidential primary to February, Holland said he suspected it partly had to do with a proposition on the Feb. 5 ballot that would have allowed state legislators to run for extra terms.
That proposition failed, but if it hadn’t, he said the legislators seeking extra terms wouldn’t have been able to run again if the statewide primary had been held at the same time.
Each election cost the county $1.5 million, as it likely did every other county in the state. Holland said the state plans to reimburse the county for the Feb. 5 election, but regardless of whose pocket the cash is coming from, he noted it’s still taxpayers' money.
“For me it doesn’t matter whether it was in February, March or June,” Holland said. “It would cost the state and the county less if they would have run only one primary instead of two.”