County Elections: Thousands of absentee ballots need to be processed

Nov. 3, 2010

Registrar of Voters, Rita A. Woodard is reminding all Tulare County residents the Registrar of Voters Office still has a lot of ballots to process from the General Election held on November 2, 2010, and the results are not final until the Registrar of Voters Office certifies the results.

We are pleased to announce Tulare County experienced a large voter turn-out yesterday, far more than expected.  The preliminary election results are well ahead of June’s Primary and we expect that when completed, the voter count will match if not exceed the Presidential Primary in November 2008.  Absentee ballots were turned in at the polls by the thousands.  Additionally, Tulare County experienced a large number of provisional ballots as well.  Over the next several weeks, the Elections Office will be processing these items as well as completing other tasks in our election canvass process.  A complete explanation of what the canvass process is can be found online at our website, www.tularecoelections.org.

Overall, the election went well.  We would like to thank all our Election Day Workers for helping to make it a successful election.  You did a great job. 

Many of the polling sites, including the Elections Office, had voters voting until after 8 p.m. which delayed the posting of the first election night results.  Due to the high volume of voters at the polling sites, results did not start coming into the office until 8:30 p.m. with the real push coming in after 9 p.m.  The last truck from the Porterville area arrived at the office after 10:30 p.m.  The election night final results were posted at midnight. 

Daily election process updates will be sent out to our press group and posted to our website around 5 p.m.  The next ballot count update will be Friday afternoon, at approximately 5 p.m.  The Elections staff will be working Monday through Friday with the minimum hours of 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. and Saturday from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m.  Additional extra help is being brought in to help process the large volume of work. The Elections Office has up to 28 days to complete the canvass process and certify the election.  This is an open process, and the public is welcome to observe.