Politics

Absentee Voters Outnumber Voters At The Polls This Year

By Alison St John / Reporter

Published December 3, 2010 at 12:42 PM PST

This story was published more than 14 years ago.

With all the votes cast in the November election tallied and squared away, San Diego’s Registrar of Voters notes that the way people prefer to vote is changing.

64% of San Diegans who had a vote, used it in November. That’s the highest turnout rate of any Southern California County.

And San Diego’s Registrar of Voters, Deborah Seiler, says more than half of those who actually cast their vote - 55% - did so by mail.

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"That’s significant," she said, "because this is the first time that the number of people voting by mail outnumbered the number of people voting at the polls in a large- turnout election."

That meant the first results right after the polls closed included more than a third of all the ballots cast: a significant indicator of the final outcome.

Seiler says some people who vote by mail still like to cast their ballots on election day. But she says those votes don’t get counted on election night… they get tallied up along with provisional ballots over the following weeks.

Politics

Alison St John

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Alison St John currently serves as a general assignment reporter and occasionally co-hosts KPBS Midday Edition. She fell in love with KPBS Radio when she arrived in San Diego in 1985 and first heard NPR. She has been a voice on KPBS Radio since 1989, and has served as a news reporter for radio, TV and the web, as well as anchoring, hosting, producing and editing. Alison has reported on stories about North County and was based in the KPBS' North County Bureau. Alison covered the metro beat during the critical period of the San Diego City pension crisis, and the education beat while Alan Bersin was the controversial Superintendent of San Diego City School District. She covered health when the industry was converting to managed care and told welfare reform stories in the late 1990s when Clinton was “ending welfare as we know it.” She has covered land use issues extensively, looking at the challenges of meeting a growing population while preserving community character, and developing a better transportation system to meet environmental concerns. She has done many stories on the military in San Diego, and the series she edited on the challenges veterans face returning from active duty to civilian life won “Best of Show” from the San Diego Society of Professional Journalists. She occasionally hosts the KPBS Roundtable and KPBS Midday Edition. Alison has won awards from the San Diego Press Club, the Society of Professional Journalists, the Associated Press TV and Radio Association, and the California Golden Mike Awards. Alison was born in Tanzania, brought up in Scotland, and earned her degree in psychology and sociology from Durham University in England. Her postgraduate diploma is in student counseling. She worked in England, Nigeria, Switzerland, Belgium, India, and Japan before moving to the United States in 1981. She now lives in Oceanside and enjoys how her community is growing and changing.