June ballots to be complicated

SANTA ANA — The ballot for the June 8 primary election is going to be a long one, and that could cost the county more money, take longer to count the votes and cause more voters to skip contests further down the ballot.

The primary election will include dozens of national, state and local races, including everything from U.S. senator to Orange County public administrator.

The ballot also will include numerous seats on political parties’ county central committees — some of which have as many as 17 candidates running for a single seat.

Costa Mesa voters will be asked to weigh in on Measure C, which calls for locking in the land on which the Orange County Fairgrounds sits for fair and exposition uses.

All this makes for a lengthy ballot, said Orange County Registrar of Voters Neal Kelley.

The candidate filing deadline was March 12 (with one extension to Wednesday), so the registrar’s office has just finalized the list of candidates who qualified to appear on the ballot. Kelley said the paper ballot will likely run three pages, and the electronic ballot will include seven or eight pages voters have to scroll through.

Each of those pages comes at a cost. For paper ballots, each page costs the county between 20 and 26 cents, Kelley said. The county must send sample ballots before the election to all 1.6 million registered voters, so a three-page ballot will cost the county at least $320,000 more than a two-page ballot.

Longer ballots also drive up the county’s costs because they are more difficult to deal with. Longer ballots are more likely to jam in tallying machines, and they are more labor-intensive to process and mail.

“The more pages you have, the more complex it is,” Kelley said.

Perhaps most critical for the integrity of the election is that the longer a ballot is, the fewer voters make it through to the end.

“Historically, you see in a long ballot the down-ticket contests have more under-votes,” Kelley said. “We always encourage people to read through to the end.”

Though June’s ballot will be long, brace yourself for an even longer one for the general election in November. That election will include many of the contests from the primary, plus numerous state initiatives that will lengthen the ballot.

For the June primary, Kelley said turnout is typically 26% to 29%, which would mean at least 400,000 county voters heading to the polls.