Voter turnout in San Benito County was lower than anticipated for this election, according to the San Benito County Elections Office.
County Auditor Joe Paul Gonzalez said an estimated 70 percent of eligible voters turned out. That’s low compared with 2008 when President Barack Obama was first elected. County turnout was around 82 percent then, Gonzalez said.
“Given the contests that were on the ballot and the national race always brings out voters, we thought for sure it was going to be in the 80 percentile,” he said.
Gonzalez noted that the county elections office still has a lot of votes to count.
“We have somewhere in the neighborhood of about 10,000 ballots to count,” he said. “Of those, there’s about 1,000 provisional ballots we have to count. Those are the ones that take a lot of time because we have to update the voter histories with the precinct voters and the vote-by-mail voters. Then we check to see in other counties if the provisional voter didn’t vote in another county.”
He continued by saying there’s a lot of investigative work that needs to be done before the office determines whether to count the vote or not. He’s sure the office won’t be done by next week, he said.
The numbers could leave the possibility for change in some local races.
“It could,” he said. “That’s a lot of ballots to process.”
