Orange County Results Due Sooner : Final State Vote Tally to Await Dec. 6 Count

Californians probably will not learn the final results of tightly contested races in Tuesday’s general election, including the Proposition 103 insurance initiative, until the official statewide canvass of ballots Dec. 6, an elections official said Friday.

Caren Daniels-Meade, media director for Secretary of State March Fong Eu, said plans now call for issuing no updates on close races that could be affected by uncounted absentee ballots.

She said it would not serve the public to report incomplete tallies because the results could seesaw daily.

“We are aware of the public concern (to learn the outcome), but it would not be responsible for us to issue daily updates that would flip-flop,” Daniels-Meade said.

However, Orange County’s more than 32,000 absentee votes are expected to be counted by late Tuesday, Assistant Registrar of Voters Roslyn Lever said Friday. She said the county expects to certify the election by Nov. 22.

While one Orange County contest, the 72nd Assembly District, was decided by a margin of less than 700 votes, the absentee ballot count is not expected to change the outcome. Republican Curt Pringle won the seat over Democrat Christian F. (Rick) Thierbach.

Two controversial statewide ballot measures, the Proposition 98 school finance proposal and consumer advocate Ralph Nader’s Proposition 103 insurance program, although winning, are winners by a relative handful of votes.

“We think it is highly, highly unlikely that Propositions 98 and 103 will end up losing because of these absentee ballots,” Daniels-Meade said. “But we acknowledge the fact it is a possibility because of the sheer numbers of absentee ballots. Absentee ballots generally mirror the statewide vote fairly closely.”

Based on discussions with some local officials and estimates made by Eu’s staff, Daniels-Meade said about 412,000 to 426,000 absentee ballots that were cast Tuesday remain to be counted, including about 100,000 in Los Angeles County.

Absentee ballots submitted on Election Day are not counted until regular ballots cast at voting places and absentee ballots received earlier are tallied.

Avoiding Estimates

Daniels-Meade said some counties refused to estimate how many uncounted absentee ballots they had on hand, fearing that if they announced a figure and it turned out to be wrong, they would be criticized.

On Wednesday, Eu’s estimate was 500,000 to 600,000 uncounted absentee ballots, but those figures were revised downward.

Eu’s office estimated that a record number of Californians voted by absentee ballot in this election, about 15% to 20%. Until fairly recently, most absentee ballots were cast by Republicans. However, in the last several elections, both parties have strongly encouraged their members to vote absentee as a means of building up their turnout.

With 99.9% of the state’s precincts reporting, Proposition 98, the school funding initiative, led by only 135,355 votes out of 8.6 million votes tallied. Proposition 103, the insurance proposal, was ahead by 203,902 out of 8.9 million counted.

Close Assembly Race

One local race that could turn on absentee counts is Los Angeles County’s 63rd Assembly District. With all precincts reported, GOP incumbent Wayne Grisham of Norwalk had lost to Democrat Robert D. Epple by a scant 87 votes. But Grisham has voiced optimism that uncounted absentee votes will return him to Sacramento.

Daniels-Meade noted that the law does not require local election officials to provide updated figures on absentee ballots before the Dec. 6 deadline for submitting their final results to Eu. In the past, local officers have done so voluntarily.

Daniels-Meade said county officials who said they will withhold the results until the deadline merely wanted to get the task accomplished as smoothly as possible without the additional burden of making daily updates.

As for determining how many absentee ballots remain to be counted, Daniels-Meade said Eu’s estimate was based on conversations with officials in two or three counties and on extrapolations made from earlier projections.