62% Voter Turnout Expected in County

Using past gubernatorial elections as a guide, Ventura County officials are predicting a 62% voter turnout Tuesday.

About 5% of county voters, or 72,491, will vote absentee, said Bruce Bradley, county elections chief.

The registrar lists 394,821 county voters eligible for the election. Of those, 39.5% are registered as Democrats and 41.87% as Republicans. About 13% decline to list party affiliation.

Although Tuesday’s ballot includes the landmark Save Open Space and Agricultural Resources measures, officials said they do not expect that to affect turnout.

“Basically we have two-thirds of the people who go to elections day in and day out,” Bradley said. “I don’t think it’s [SOAR] bringing people to the polls who have never gone before.”

If approved, SOAR’s countywide Measure B would prevent politicians from rezoning open space and farmland outside cities without voters’ approval.

Similar measures will also appear on the ballot in Thousand Oaks, Simi Valley, Oxnard, Camarillo and Santa Paula. Those measures would prevent the cities from expanding their borders without a vote of the people.

Herbert Gooch, a political science professor at Cal Lutheran University, predicted that all SOAR measures would be approved, if only because SOAR’s supporters seem more broadly motivated than their opponents.

“The [anti-SOAR] battle has been waged not so much by ground troops as from the air,” he said. “They seem sort of top-heavy in their camp: a lot of mailers, less knocking on doors and rallies.”

Voters should be prepared to linger awhile in the ballot booth Tuesday. In addition to picking a governor, congressional representatives, state legislators and other state and local officials, they will be asked to weigh in on 12 statewide propositions as well as local measures.

City residents will receive six ballot cards Tuesday, except in Thousand Oaks, where local measures and a long City Council slate require seven. Voters in unincorporated areas will have to punch five cards.

Given the ballot’s length, Bradley suggested that voters learn the candidates and issues beforehand by using the sample ballots mailed to them in recent weeks.

“If you go in cold and you have no idea what to vote on, it’s probably going to take you 10 minutes,” he said.

Gooch said local initiatives, such as the $88-million school bond in the Conejo Valley Unified School District, may have an advantage by being at the end of a lengthy ballot.

It’s a phenomenon called voter fatigue: An initiative’s supporters will be sure to vote on it, but the “casual” voter, who is harder to predict, may bail out before the ballot’s end.

“You want them to get fatigued by the time they get to the bottom,” Gooch said. “It makes your group look better.”

Bradley said he expects fatigue to set in around the middle of the ballot, when voters will be asked to choose several Supreme Court and Appellate Court justices.

“I think this time you get more tired in the middle because you want to push on to the local races,” he said.

The weather Tuesday is expected to be sunny, slightly breezy and warm, said meteorologist Dennis Tussey of the National Weather Service in Oxnard. High temperatures throughout the county are expected to be in the 70s with lows in the low 50s.