The final countdown

Alicia Robinson

JoAnn Duggan has sat in a cavernous warehouse amid boxes filled with

ballots nearly every day since Oct. 28, opening envelopes and

stacking the papers she finds inside.

It might not sound like a thrilling job, but it could change the

outcome of the City Council race in Costa Mesa, where candidate Eric

Bever is holding on to the third of three council seats by fewer than

100 votes as of Tuesday.

The election was over by Nov. 3 for most voters, but the results

aren’t official until they are certified, which must be done by Nov.

30, assistant registrar Suzanne Slupsky said. It may take election

workers until then to record and verify thousands of absentee,

provisional and paper ballots, cast by voters who didn’t want to use

the county’s electronic machines.

On Tuesday, about 60,000 absentee ballots and 55,000 provisional

ballots remained to be counted in Orange County, Slupsky said.

In the Costa Mesa council race, additional ballots could mean a

winner other than Bever. Katrina Foley and Linda Dixon hold two of

the three open seats with solid leads of more than 2,000 votes each,

but Bever was just 92 votes ahead of Bruce Garlich -- a change since

Nov. 3, when incumbent Mike Scheafer was closest.

The absentee and provisional ballots come from all precincts, so

there’s no telling how many Costa Mesa ballots are still out. It will

take some time to finish the count because more people generally vote

in presidential contests than other elections, Slupsky said.

Some of them may not be registered or haven’t updated their

registration, so they need provisional ballots, she added.

“With the amount of provisionals that we have, it seems that we’re

getting to within a few days of our state deadline [of Nov. 30],” she

said.

Since Nov. 2, the warehouse at the Orange County Registrar of

Voters office has been a hive of activity. About 70 workers sit

opening envelopes of absentee ballots and putting the ballots in

stacks to be fed into a machine that records the votes.

Duggan, 76, and some other volunteers have been stacking ballots

for 15 years.

Elmer Binggeli, 68, said he and his fellow stackers often see

names they recognize as they go through the ballots.

“You’ve been doing it so long, you almost know them by first

name,” he said.

“And if they’re not here, you wonder what happened to them,”

Duggan added.

Before ballots go to volunteers for stacking, they’ve already made

several other stops. First, the signature on absentee ballots is

scanned and verified against the signature on the voter’s

registration. Next, the ballots are sorted by machine, and those

damaged or possibly invalid are taken out. Stackers prepare the valid

ballots for a machine that reads them and records the votes.

Registrar employees operate the machines and handle absentee

ballots that are challenged, checking questionable signatures and

making sure the voter’s home address is on the envelope.

“We liberally construe [signatures] in favor of the voter,”

Slupsky said. “We take one letter of the signature, and as long as it

matches, we count it as good.”

Vote totals are updated daily at 5 p.m. and can be found on the

Orange County Registrar of Voters website at

https://www.ocgov.com/election.

* ALICIA ROBINSON covers business, politics and the environment.

She may be reached at (714) 966-4626 or by e-mail at

[email protected].