Tally Oh! A Bush-Kerry Tie Had to be Unknotted

In her government office in the tiny eastern Sierra town of Bridgeport, Mono County Clerk Renn Nolan gasped at the final tally for the U.S. presidential race.

Democrat John Kerry: 2,200 votes. Republican George Bush: 2,200 votes.

“You think you were startled, I about dropped dead,” Nolan said Wednesday. “I’ve had such trouble with this [ballot counting] machine and then it comes out a dead heat?”

And so, beginning at 8 a.m., Nolan and some helpers began recounting all 5,141 ballots cast in this vast but sparsely populated county of 7,000 registered voters. They paid particular attention to ballots marked with black or blue ink, which sometimes bleeds through or doesn’t register on optical scanning equipment.

“Some black pens are fine, some black pens are not,” Nolan said midway through her nine-hour recount, a bit weary and exasperated but good-humored.

People, she explained, just don’t want to read instructions before voting.

“If they would just all stick to a No. 2 pencil, we’d be fine.”

In this county anchored by the resort town of Mammoth Lakes -- the primary employment center and home to half of the county’s 14,000 residents -- voters tend to narrowly favor Republicans but also have an independent streak, Nolan and other residents said.

The largest private employer is the Mammoth Mountain resort, followed by government and then the restaurants and hotels catering to visitors who flock to the area for skiing, fishing and other outdoor recreation.

Mammoth, with its condominiums and shopping centers, is at the southern end of Mono County. The remaining towns are much smaller, most of them dotting U.S. 395 as it snakes up the eastern Sierra into Nevada.

And it is Mammoth, which has all of the county’s five or six traffic lights, that probably delivered more Democratic votes than anyone expected in the closely fought presidential race.

“I thought Bush would take the county,” said Nolan, who voted for the president. There was a last-minute flood of 1,500 registrants, most of them from Mammoth Lakes, and she suspects they were people in their 30s or younger.

She’d not done a breakdown of voting patterns, but other Mono County residents agreed with her assessment.

Residents said Bush vs. Kerry was less of an issue in Mono County than recreational snowmobiling. Some environmentalists want to outlaw the vehicles in the Sonora Pass. But business owners, who rely on winter tourism for survival, oppose the idea.

“The winter’s really hard here,” said Wayne Norton, owner of Buster’s Market in Bridgeport for almost 40 years, and a Bush voter. “What little we get in the way of winter tourism are snowmobilers. I’m a snowmobiler and a businessman who’s trying not to starve to death in the winter.”

The county has its share of Los Angeles transplants, many lured to Mammoth and June Lake.

Nolan made the exodus herself, relocating a generation ago from the San Fernando Valley.

In 1861, the county seat was moved from Aurora -- which actually was in the state of Nevada -- to Bridgeport, where, at 4:51 p.m. Wednesday, Nolan’s recount was complete.

John Kerry had won Mono County by seven votes.