Seal Beach Mails In Better Results

In the first -- and probably last -- all-mail election in Orange County that ended Tuesday, Seal Beach drew an unusually high turnout, with 35% of registered voters participating, an 8% increase over the previous election, when voters went to the polls.

The mail-in vote in the seaside town, which has 19,296 eligible voters, was an effort to save the city money. But it gave candidates the added challenge of campaigning in a citywide vote that was without an actual election day.

“The only thing that was different is the ballots were sent out a month early,” said Mayor Charles Antos, who was reelected in this vote. “So what ended up happening is we had to figure out how do you conduct a campaign, because there’s no election day per se.”

In addition to Antos, voters elected a new council member and passed six of seven measures, including one that will consolidate Seal Beach’s election with the county’s, moving elections to November.

Newly elected Councilman Gordon Shanks, who defeated incumbent Paul Yost, said he wished the ballots had been sent out a couple of weeks after Feb. 27 to reduce the chances of voters losing their ballots or confusing them with junk mail.

“It took a lot of effort to make sure people didn’t throw out their ballots,” Shanks said.

Shanks, 71, described the campaign as long and exhaustive; he and his opponent not only had to sell themselves, but also remind residents to mail in their votes. “We tried to get people to mail it in the first week,” he said.

Neal Kelley, the acting county registrar of voters, said the only other city in the state he knew of with all-mail elections was Burbank, whose last six have been so conducted. In 1998, Oregon became the first state to conduct all of its elections by mail. Voter turnout there is higher than in most states, experts said.

In general, all-mail elections cost from one-third to one-half of a polling-place election. Although final numbers are not yet available for Seal Beach, city officials estimate the election cost about $50,000. The last one, in March 2004, cost about $85,000, which included a runoff in June. City officials agreed that an all-mail ballot election would make sense because in the last election, 60% of the votes cast were absentee.

All-mail voting has pros and cons, said Lynn Vavreck, an assistant political science professor at UCLA. It’s easier for people to vote, she said, but it’s also easier to lose ballots. And although all-mail voting costs less, she said, it increases the chances of voter fraud. And once a ballot is mailed in, she said, a voter cannot rescind if new information casts a candidate in an unfavorable light.

Experts say it’s unlikely that all-mail elections will become a growing trend.

“There are a large number of people who want to go to polls on election day,” said Kelley. “This is what we’ve been doing since [the adoption of] our Constitution.”