Thread: Early voting turnout in LA County shatters previous first-day numbers

Early voting turnout in LA County shatters previous first-day numbers


RICH PEDRONCELLI-ASSOCIATED PRESS File photo

By David Montero, LA Daily News
POSTED: 05/09/16, 7:39 PM PDT | UPDATED: 4 DAYS AGO
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The first day of early voting in this year’s presidential primary at the Los Angeles County Registrar’s office obliterated the total number of ballots cast at the start of the California primary four years ago.

A total of 57 people went to the Registrar’s Office to vote Monday -- almost five times the number in 2012. Yes, it was a relative tsunami of civic engagement compared to the Mitt Romney-Barack Obama presidential primary that saw 12 people cast ballots on the first day of early voting.

•RELATED STORY: Want to vote now? Here’s the rundown on early voting in Southern California

But there are still close to 1.65 million folks eligible to vote-by-mail in the county -- and 4.8 million registered overall who can be courted between now and June 7 by candidates seeking their votes.

That means campaigning in California will continue, and vote-by-mail participants, particularly those who wait until the last minute, still have plenty of time to hear from the candidates and make their decisions. You can even have your ballot post-marked on June 7 and, as long as the Registrar gets it within three days of election day, your vote will count just as much as those eager voters who showed up at the registrar’s Norwalk headquarters Monday.

•RELATED STORY: Bernie Sanders campaign taps Rosario Dawson, Luis Guzman to woo Latino voters in LA

Los Angeles County has sought to improve conveniences for early voters and to increase its 34.5 percent participation rate. Compared to the surrounding counties of Orange, San Bernardino and Riverside, it lags in vote-by-mail numbers.

But the registrar is planning to have 11 kiosks scattered throughout the county to help make it more convenient for early voters to get engaged.

The county began mailing out sample ballots with vote-by-mail applications on April 28 and will continue to do so through May 17.

http://www.dailynews.com/government-...st-day-numbers

by MICHELLE MOONS
15 May 2016

In the first five days of early voting in Los Angeles County, turnout figures reveal that 3.5 times as many voters logged their votes in California’s primary election as in 2012.

Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders are vying for their respective party’s endorsements. Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee after Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) lost the Indiana primary and subsequently left the race.

Early voting in California begins 29 days prior to the day of the election, on May 9. June 7 is primary day in California for 2016. The L.A. Registrar of voters reported 252 early votes for this primary as of Friday, according to the Los Angeles Daily News. For the same period of time in the 2012 presidential election year, only 72 ballots were cast.

The L.A. Registrar reports a 21.87 percent turnout of primary election voters among those registered in presidential year 2012. In 2008, the year that then Sen. Barack Obama won his party’s nomination over Hillary Clinton in the primary, L.A. County turnout was 55.26 percent. In 2004, turnout was 37.59 percent.

In an April, Breitbart News’ analysis of Republican primary election votes through the New York primary established that 2016 Republican frontrunner Donald Trump had topped 2012 eventual nominee Mitt Romney’s popular vote totals by over two million votes. Even second-place Cruz came a mere near 290,000 short of Romney’s total. Breitbart News analysis of GOP primary election turnout for that period also revealed a jump of 8.7 million votes in 2016 over 2012.

Of the estimated 10.1 million people that live in Los Angeles, approximately 6.1 million are eligible to vote. 4.8 million people in L.A. county were actually registered to vote as of May 2016.

Mail-in ballots — expected to constitute some two-thirds of the total — were sent on May 10, and can be turned in at any time up through Election Day, as long as they are postmarked by June 7 and received by June 10.

http://www.breitbart.com/california/...ping-2012-350/