High number of mail-in ballots raises concern of late vote tally
By ALLISON HOFFMAN Associated Press Writer
Article Launched: 02/05/2008 02:58:25 PM PST


LOS ANGELES—A record number of Californians is casting mail-in ballots for Tuesday's presidential primary, one factor that is expected to lead to a later-than-normal vote tally.

Voter interest is running high, with both the Republican and Democratic presidential primaries hotly contested. That's causing many of the 5.5 million voters who requested absentee ballots to wait until the last minute to make a decision.

That could lead some counties to delay final results until Wednesday or later. Mail-in ballots that are received on Election Day can be counted only after precinct votes are tallied and then must go through a time-consuming verification process.

With about 50 percent of ballots expected to be mail-in, registrars are warning that 20 percent or more of all ballots may go uncounted on Election Night.

The shift in California's presidential primary from June to February this year repositioned the state, the nation's richest delegate prize, as a key battleground for candidates. Voters responded to the heightened interest, with 15.7 million registering for Tuesday's election.

That's the most ever for a presidential primary in California and is 700,000 more than registered for the 2004 primary.

The majority of voters will cast paper ballots after an intensive review of electronic voting machines last year revealed that many of them could be hacked, leading the secretary of state's office to implement new restrictions.

That prompted 21 counties to revert to paper ballots, including some of the state's most populous—Riverside, San Bernardino, San Diego and Santa Clara.

The return to paper ballots in some of those counties also plays into the expected slow tally on Election Night, in part because counties do not have enough high-speed optical scan machines to read the paper ballots quickly.

Instead of simply loading memory cards into readers and getting instant results, workers at county offices throughout the state will spend the night feeding ballots into scanning machines by hand.

A shortage of smaller scanning machines, which typically are distributed to individual polling places, means many counties will do all their counting at a central office. Ballots will be driven—and sometimes flown—from far-flung locations.

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