Bakersfield.com: Kern County news, events, classifieds, shopping, & search

RSS Feed   Print Story   E-mail Story        

Absentee ballots go out in Kern

Campaigns likely to court by-mail voters

BY JAMES BURGER, Californian staff writer
e-mail: jburger@bakersfield.com | Monday, Jan 7 2008 10:45 PM

Last Updated: Monday, Jan 7 2008 10:49 PM

More than one-third of all Kern voters now mail in their ballots and that might make them targets for early, aggressive campaign tactics, officials and pundits said.

Around 110,000 absentee ballots were sent to voters on Monday. Of those, around 97,000 were permanent absentee voters, according to county elections chief Sandy Brockman.

There are roughly 267,000 registered voters in the county.

A push by Brockman and her boss, Kern County Auditor-Controller Ann Barnett, to convert poll-site voters into permanent "vote-by-mail" ballot-casters brought in around 32,000 new mail voters in 2007, she said.

The goal was to increase voter turnout since absentee voters cast ballots at a much higher rate -- often above 80 or 90 percent.

"There will be less people at the polls. Instead of voting at the polls people will be voting at home. I hope that will help voter turnout," Brockman said.

That could also make absentee ballot-casters, in Kern County and nationwide, a target for high-dollar presidential campaigns with aggressive phone campaigns, said Allan Hoffenblum, publisher of The California Target Book, a publication that tracks races in California.

"These are voters most likely to vote. They will be courted," Hoffenblum said. "Those presidential campaigns that have the most money to contact these voters are contacting them right now."

Hoffenblum said it isn't certain how much California voters getting their ballots in the mail this week will be influenced by last week's votes in Iowa and today's vote in New Hampshire.

But it is apparent that some early campaign assumptions, such as the one that Hillary Clinton had a firm lead in the race for the Democratic nomination, have been overturned, he said.

What is certain in Kern County, Barnett said, is that absentee ballots will help ease the pain of a ballot counting process that will be slow now that use of touch-screen voting booths is limited.