Voter turnout

[arethinn]

Apparently, what I thought looked like pretty decent voter turnout to judge by my precinct, namely that it was not a ghost town with just me and the poll workers (and maybe one other person) but actually had four people in the available booths and four more waiting behind us, was 34% in Santa Clara County. WHAT THE HELL ASS BALLS. Maybe it was slightly higher in my precinct than countywide, I dunno. There is a precinct-level spreadsheet, but my precinct's not in it (!!). (Maybe they're still counting the possibly massive number of mail-in ballots here? The voter roll page I signed in on had, like, 4/5 of the spaces where you normally write in your street address greyed out as mail-in.) Out of 1099 precincts listed, only 29 were 50% or higher, and some of those look like some kind of administrative fictions and not actual residential areas since they have single-digit numbers of registered voters, even as low as 1 (although maybe there are "precincts" for "that one dude living way out on his former cattle acreage in an unincorporated part of the county").

eta: I lost the tab I had the article in, but apparently more than 75 percent of voters use mail-in ballots in Santa Clara County. And this doesn't exactly translate to early voting, because you can drop them off in person or mail them as late as election day itself, and they're still counted if received within 3 days. Yikes.

Comments

[feyandstrange]

Turnout in SF was in the around-45% range, which is about average for a midterm election (or at least matches last year's numbers).