More Making Choice to Cast Votes by Mail in Long Beach

Twenty years ago, there were so few absentee ballot applications that City Clerk Shelba Powell handled them by herself. This year she hired 22 temporary election workers to process the flood of absentee requests received by her office.

The clerk’s office sent out 13,345 absentee ballots for last week’s municipal elections, a record number for an April election in Long Beach and 5,355 more than the office sent out for the last citywide municipal election in 1988. Voters returned 7,557 absentee ballots, representing 4.3% of the total voter turnout Tuesday.

The growing numbers reflect a statewide trend in the use of absentee ballots that this year prompted the secretary of state’s office to warn city clerks to be prepared for a last-minute onslaught of the ballots that would slow counting on Election Day.

Indeed, bleary-eyed election workers were still tallying the last of the absentee ballots at 3 a.m. Wednesday morning.

“I think they should begin to call it vote by mail,” joked Sid Solomon, political action chairman of Long Beach Area Citizens Involved, a citywide political group.

Absentee vote counts have been climbing since 1978, when state law was changed so that voters no longer needed an excuse such as illness or travel to request an absentee ballot. Now anyone who would prefer not to make the trek to the polls on Election Day can use an absentee ballot.

In the Cerritos council races, one candidate, Charles J. Kim, received more votes by absentee balloting (1,135), than he did in the polling booth (802). The number of absentee ballots cast in the Cerritos elections was three times greater than in 1988.

“The absentee vote continues to increase in California, I think for a couple of reasons,” said Jeff Adler, a political consultant who is helping run Mayor Ernie Kell’s reelection campaign.

“Candidates are more and more turning to them as an effective campaign tool to spread the message and try to motivate voters,” Adler said. “Secondly, voters like them because it makes it easy to participate.”

In last Tuesday’s election, Kell received 3,416 absentee votes--more than twice the number of absentee ballots cast for all the candidates running in the 1984 council races.

In an era of dismal voter turnout--only 25% of Long Beach’s registered voters bothered to vote last week--absentee ballots are seen as a way of nudging people to the ballot box.

“Well listen, they got to do something to increase the voter turnout,” Solomon said. “I’m in favor of the whole system going by mail. They aren’t going to the polls.”

A number of candidates in the Long Beach election sent out absentee ballot applications as part of their campaign mailing. In Kell’s case, the applications came with prepaid return postage, with the name of the voter printed on the application. The only thing the voter had to do was sign the application and pop it in the mailbox.

Absentee ballots are not only a way of encouraging a vote, but they can encourage a vote in favor of a particular candidate. “You’re making it easier to vote for your candidate or your issue,” Adler said.

“It’s pretty much standard in any reasonably well-organized campaign,” said mayoral candidate and Councilman Tom Clark, who routinely woos the absentee vote in his campaigns.

If the trend continues, Clark added, it will force candidates to step up their campaigns earlier in the election season to reach voters before they send in their ballots.

It also makes more work for the clerk’s office, which accepts absentee ballots in a given election until the polls close on Election Day. Workers must then process the last-minute arrivals, matching the absentee signatures with the voter registration records before they can be counted.

Heavy campaign promotion of absentee applications has raised criticism in some races. In one recent state Assembly contest in central California, the Republican Party caused a stir when it hired temporary workers to walk precincts and collect absentee ballot applications.

But Adler says he sees nothing wrong with getting campaign workers involved in absentee applications. “I don’t think they’re involved in the process any more than when a campaign goes out and registers voters.”