More Voters Get a Head Start

With the prospect that their votes might make more of a difference in a close national election, Orange County voters this year requested a record number of absentee ballots: a hearty 290,000.

That is one-fifth of the 1,342,746 voters registered in Orange County. The previous high was 224,000 absentee ballots in 1998, Registrar of Voters Rosalyn Lever said.

One woman left Lever’s Santa Ana office with more than two dozen ballots she was fetching for residents of the retirement home where she works. Others lined up, sometimes in queues 20 people long, to return completed ballots.

“Every year we’re seeing more and more absentee ballots, and it is really nothing more than simple convenience,” Lever said Monday. “Some people don’t want to go to a polling place if they don’t have to.”

While more than 100,000 of the county’s absentee ballots will be counted today, she said, it could take a week or longer to verify and count the rest. In California, county offices have until Dec. 5 to report final results, meaning that close contests could be cliffhangers for weeks.

Across California, officials this year are reporting a record number of absentee voters: 3.2 million all told. Given the state’s 54 electoral votes--one-fifth of the 270 needed to win--it is possible that Americans might not know immediately who the next president is.

Absentee ballots take longer to tally because signatures must be verified.

On Monday, as early voters filed into Lever’s office, volunteers were already counting ballots in another room. The crew will make fast work of many ballots because voters marked them only for the presidential race. “You can almost tell by picking up the envelope if they only wanted to vote for the president,” Lever said.

Some voters in her office Monday used emergency ballots, granted to people who missed the deadline for absentee status but had unexpected circumstances that would keep them away from the polls today.

A few admitted to having invented excuses. “I’m basically here today because I don’t want to deal with the chaos tomorrow,” a Costa Mesa man said.

Darren Boihem, 31, of Mission Viejo said he was called out of town on business. The presidential race “is up for grabs, and it was really important for me to make the effort and vote,” he said. “You really feel like your vote matters in an election like this.”

Jean Mauldin, 77, said her life was disrupted by a fire in Santa Ana last week that killed her grandson and left her family grieving. She voted early, she said Monday, because “I don’t what will happen tomorrow.”

Businessman Jeff Goh, 36, of Tustin said he would be out of town today but could not miss voting in the close presidential race and taking a stand against Proposition 38, which would provide tax-funded vouchers to parents for private school tuition.

“It really is impossible to tell which way either of those is going to go,” Goh said. “So I thought, ‘My vote really might mean something here.’ I didn’t want to pass that up.”

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Times staff writer David Haldane contributed to this report.