San Benito County voters went for Arnold Schwarzenegger in a big
way during Tuesday’s recall election with the Republican
gubernatorial candidate earning nearly 60 percent of the total
vote.
However, the turnout for the recall election, 49.6 percent of
registered voters, was only slightly higher than the 47.2 percent
of registered voters who went to the polls in November 2002 to
re-elect Gray Davis.
San Benito County voters went for Arnold Schwarzenegger in a big way during Tuesday’s recall election with the Republican gubernatorial candidate earning nearly 60 percent of the total vote.
However, the turnout for the recall election, 49.6 percent of registered voters, was only slightly higher than the 47.2 percent of registered voters who went to the polls in November 2002 to re-elect Gray Davis.
While the majority of locals voted for the former Mr. Universe, the vote to recall Davis was much closer. A total of 54.6 percent, or 6,915 residents voted to remove Davis, which was 1,156 more than the 45.4 percent, or 5,759 people who voted to keep Davis in office, according to the unofficial totals.
San Benito County Clerk John Hodges said the 12,783 votes that have been counted is only slightly higher than the 12,696 voters who went to the polls last November.
“That’s what we’ve counted so far, but we still have a lot of absentee ballots which came in to the polling places that have to be counted,” Hodges said.
Schwarz-enegger received an unofficial total of 5,608 votes or 59.6 percent for governor in San Benito County.
Schwarzenegger’s total was nearly 2,000 more votes than Cruz Bustamante who received 3,696 or 39.3 percent of the vote. Tom McClintock received 1,581 votes and the Green Party’s Peter Camejo garnered a total of 284 votes, according to the totals from Tuesday’s balloting.
Voting with their pocket books and wallets in mind, local voters rejected a pair of ballot measures.
Measure 53, which called for up to three percent of the state’s general fund to be spent on the state’s infrastructure, was turned down with 65.7 percent, or 7,745 votes, from people voting no and only 34.3 percent, or 4,037 people, voting yes, according to elections records.
Measure 54, which proposed to ban state and local governments and agencies from collecting and classifying data by race, was also rejected by San Benito County residents, with 62.4 percent, or 7,612 votes, against it and 37.6 percent, or 4,588 votes, in favor of it.
Hodges said the final local tally on the election will not be known for a few more days as the remaining 300 or 400 absentee ballots are counted.
“We should be done with the canvassing sometime next week,” Hodges said.
He said one of the main concerns going into the election – overvotes – never materialized.
With 135 candidates on the ballot to chose from, elections officials said they were worried that people would vote for too many candidates. Those who voted for more than one candidate would be considered an overvote and their ballots would not count.
“As far as overvotes were concerned, there was a bare minimum,” Hodges said. “It seems like we had some really smart voters this year.”
