Mail-in voting surging locally, across state

June 2, 2008

After California state law was amended in 2002 to allow any registered voter to request a mail-in ballot, the number of voters doing so has skyrocketed.

"We had about 9,000 absentee voters in 2002," Elma Rosas of the Santa Clara County Registrar of Voters said. For the June 3 election, 473,797 voters have requested to be permanent mail-in status. That's 66 percent of the total number of voters.

In San Mateo County, 44 percent of the registered voters have requested mail-in ballots. The number in Santa Clara County is higher "because they've been pretty aggressive" in offering it to residents as a option, David Tom of the San Mateo County Elections Office said.

Statewide, the mail-in vote is also on the rise.

In the February presidential primary election, 41.65 percent of people cast ballots by mail, according to the Secretary of State's office. That's compared to 32.61 percent in the November 2004 presidential election.

For Palo Alto, the mail-in numbers are even higher than countywide numbers. About 74 percent of the voters in the Palo Alto Unified School District (which includes Stanford University and part of Los Altos Hills) have requested mail-in ballots for Tuesday's election.

The increase in mail-in balloting means that some voters no longer have a local polling place. Voters in precincts that have fewer than 250 registered, non-mail voters no longer have a neighborhood polling place to walk to on election day. That means 22 precincts in the Palo Alto Unified School District, along with eight in Mountain View, are now "mail-in precincts."

Voters in those precincts were sent mail-in ballots early enough for them to be mailed back before election day, Rosas said. But voters were also given addresses of other nearby polling places to drop their ballots off on election day.

The trend continues upward.

There were 266 "mail-in precincts" in the 2004 presidential election in Santa Clara County, Rosas said, which jumped to 289 in the February presidential election to 347 in Tuesday's election.