Orange County’s 1,094,405 Votes Are Tallied; Several Recounts Are Possible

The Orange County registrar’s office finished counting the remaining ballots from the Nov. 2 election Wednesday, with the winners unchanged from earlier counts.

Two city council races, however, ended with winners ahead by fewer than 100 votes, raising the possibility of recounts.

In Costa Mesa, 44 votes separated Councilman-elect Eric Bever from challenger Bruce Garlich. There were only 23 votes splitting La Palma Councilman-elect Mark Waldman and challenger Henry Charoen.

And in a third close race, Orange Unified’s $196-million school bond measure fell just short of the necessary 55% of the vote to pass, getting 54.6%. It was the second time this year that a bond measure proposed by the district failed.

The Board of Supervisors will certify the election Tuesday. Challengers have five days after that to ask for a recount.

The final results were delayed because of the need to count about 200,000 absentee ballots mailed early but that remained unopened on election night. An additional 40,000 absentee ballots were turned in at polling places and 60,000 provisional ballots were cast by voters whose registration had to be verified.

Election workers had to verify signatures on each of those 300,000 ballots and confirm that the voters had not cast other ballots.

The mound of ballots overwhelmed the registrar’s office, which had done a better job in previous years to count absentee ballots after the polls closed. In the October 2003 recall of Gov. Gray Davis, for example, the county had 70,700 unprocessed ballots the day after the election; in the November 2002 general election, there were 65,800.

As of Wednesday’s final count, 1,094,405 voters cast ballots in Orange County, a 73% turnout. Of those, a third were cast by absentee voters. The rest were recorded from the county’s electronic voting machines, which reported few problems on election night.

Los Angeles County had a much swifter count of its 3 million voters, verifying most of the absentee ballots before the election. Registrar Conny McCormack, who also is the county recorder, said she used her staff from that office -- who are cross-trained on election duties -- to work overtime the weekend before the election to process absentees.

Orange County Registrar of Voters Steve Rodermund said final counts are always slow because of the verification process. Most counties take the full 30 days to certify their elections.

He told supervisors this month that the voting was a success because there were no glitches of the type that marred the March primary, when some voters were given ballots for the wrong races at polling places.

Supervisor Chris Norby said he would like more voters to be encouraged to vote using the county’s electronic system, since the count is so much faster. But critics questioned the reliability of electronic systems because there was no way to verify each vote in the case of a recount.

Beginning next year, however, each machine must produce a paper ballot that can verify each vote in case a recount is requested.