Home News Local News Baker County voters turned out, but didn’t turn the tide

Baker County voters turned out, but didn’t turn the tide

Written by ED MERRIMAN Baker City Herald January 27, 2010 07:35 am

County’s voter turnout was more than 6 percent higher than the statewide tally

Measures 66 and 67 passed statewide by a wide margin in Tuesdays special election, despite a nearly 2-to-1 vote against the measures in Baker County and many others across Eastern Oregon and other rural areas of the state.

Tami Green, Baker County Clerk and chief elections officer, said the turnout in Baker County topped 65 percent, eclipsing the 55 percent turnout in the October Baker City Council recall election.

In reflecting on past special elections, however, Green said voter turnout is often higher for elections that affect voters’ pocketbooks and public services.

Interestingly, Green said, the Oct. 28 recall election produced a similar 2-1 margin of no votes cast against the recall.

Green said the turnout in general was higher in counties with smaller populations.

Wheeler County, the least populous of the state’s 36 counties, had the highest turnout at 71.7 percent.

“This is a sad day for Oregon,” said Kyle Knight, a Baker High School student volunteer who ran the No on Measures 66 and 67 campaign in Baker County.

Knight said when he was going around town talking to people about the measures, “a lot of businesses were saying they were going to have to reduce staff to part time and cut back on charitable organizations to things like school activities and the YMCA and others.”

“To tell you the truth I don’t think the (No on 66 and 67) campaign did a very good job with the two ads they ran,” Knight said. “One basically giving some facts and showing Obama saying this is not a great time to raise taxes in a recession.”

Knight said he felt the Obama connection didn’t resonate with Oregon voters.

“I think they made a mistake not pointing out this is a backdoor approach to a sales tax,” which voters have repeatedly rejected, Knight said.

“We were outspent, and the ballot was really misleading. It wasn’t just the facts. It misrepresented the facts,” he said.

Knight spent election night in Salem at one of the No on 66 and 67 election night parties, where he said the mood turned from optimistic to gloomy. The Oregonian called the election 15 minutes after the polls closed.

In Tuesday’s election a new statewide computer system was used for the first time. Every county posted its results directly into a computer program that immediately displayed the results, so elections officials could instantly see the results in other counties and the statewide totals, Green said.

In past elections, Green said the Secretary of State’s Elections Division had someone pulling elections results off county Web sites after the polls closed, which posed a potential for human error in transcribing county vote tallies.

“We had all the results for the first tally 15 minutes after the polls closed at 8 p.m.,” Green said. “This is the first time we had live results.”

She said the special election, with just two measures on the ballot, was an easy test for the new statewide elections system called the Oregon Centralized Voter Registration System, which in turn uploaded election results to the ORESTAR program, used by the state Elections Division to tally and broadcast the results for all the county elections offices to see.

By 9:30 p.m. Tuesday, when the last Baker County ballots from the outlying communities were counted, Green said the computer program showed Multnomah County with 137,779 yes votes to 55,309 no on Measure 66.