Posts Tagged: absentee

Analysis

CA120: For Recall Redux, big changes since last time around

Gov. Gavin Newsom at an environmental cleanup even in Long Beach on Aug. 5.(Photo: Howard Freshman)

ANALYSIS: We’re headed for another recall election, the first in nearly 20 years. A lot of things have changed, including the number of voters who will be casting their ballots by mail. Looking back at 2003, there were only 3 million voters who received their ballots in the mail.  This cycle, all 22 million voters are getting their ballots in the mail, and we’re likely to see the vast majority of those cast by mail prior to Election Day.

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Before Election Day, votes come in

Illustration of a California voter casting a ballot. (Photo: Vepar5, via Shutterstock)

Before Election Day, fewer than one in every five California voters have cast their ballots. About 11.8 primary election million ballots were mailed during the past month — 5.3 million to Democrats and about 3.1 million to Republicans, according to figures compiled by Political Data, a firm that markets campaign information.

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CA120: Issa down; Prop. 61, death penalty repeal up

Doug Applegate, left, and Darrell Issa. (Photo illustration by Tim Foster, Capitol Weekly)

EXIT POLL: What a year it has been for polling-related news in California – please try to contain your excitement. The venerable Field Poll went online (shades of Dylan Goes Electric). Meanwhile, USC and the LA Times combined to produce the most, um, “noteworthy” poll of the cycle (shades of Dewey Defeats Truman), which polling Director Dan Schnur posted on twitter “is wrong, but still gives us important info…”

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CA120: Tracking the absentee vote tracker

A street sign for voters. (Photo by Gustavo Frazao, via Shutterstock)

CA120: The 2016 General Absentee Vote Tracker is up, and over two million California voters have already returned their ballots. This year, a great deal of national attention is being paid to the rate of early voting, and politicos on both sides of the aisle are using this data to make predictions in the presidential, congressional and state contests.

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Exit poll: The down-ballot races

Voters in Ventura County cast ballots during a recent election. (Photo: Spirit of America, Shutterstock)

CA120: Will Orange County, along with neighboring San Diego and the Inland Empire, look a little bluer on Wednesday? If so, is it a harbinger of things to come? Or is it just the impact of the Democratic presidential primary still being contested while Donald Trump has the GOP nomination wrapped up?

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Exit poll: In tight CA race, absentee voters favor Hillary

Presidential candidates. (Illustration by Tim Foster, Capitol Weekly)

CA120: With just hours until polls close in California, the crucial Democratic presidential contest between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders appears to be tightening. On the Republican side, the unopposed presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump is trying to show that he can consolidate the Republican electorate behind his candidacy.

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CA120: Confusion lurks in the California primary

Voters casting ballots in Ventura County during an earlier election. (Photo: Joseph Sohm, Shutterstock)

As we enter the June primary, we have an electorate that has been seen in polling to be more energized and with a desire to vote more commonly in general elections. The last time we had anything close to this kind of engagement was during the 2008 presidential primary. Since then, we have seen a 35% growth in No Party Preference registrations and an 88% spike in the number of Permanent Absentee Voters. In total, the population of non-partisan voters who get their ballots by mail has nearly tripled.

Analysis

Time, the killer of campaigns

Illustration by Judd Hertzler/Capitol Weekly.

ANALYSIS: Most politicos are fans of the movie The Candidate, a 1972 political drama where a U.S. Senate candidate, Bill McKay, seeks an underdog win in his first campaign. The energy and excitement builds up for months leading to a pivotal sunny Tuesday in California when everyone heads to the polls. The movie is filled with young excited volunteers rushing out to put up door hangers, check polling locations to see who’s voted, and make phone calls to those who haven’t – all parts of the traditional get out the vote efforts known in the business as G.O.T.V. But if this campaign were a modern campaign it would also be a losing campaign.

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In California, Election Day really is Election Month

U.S. Senate election, 2012

In little more than a decade, mail-in or “absentee” voting for statewide elections quadrupled, from 4.4 percent in 1978 to 18.4 percent in 1990, reflecting in part legal changes making it easier to vote absentee. Since the 1990s, mail-in ballots have increased exponentially. In the 2008 primary, 58 percent of the voters cast mail-in ballots, the first time in a California statewide election that mail-in ballots represented more than half the vote. In primaries since then, mail-in voting has risen steadily to a remarkable 65 percent in 2012. In the November 2012 general election, mail-in ballots accounted for about 51 percent. (Above: 2012 U.S. Senate election map/Kurykh, Wikimedia))

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