Voter turnout in Tooele County for the 2018 non-presidential general election possibly set a new record for modern times.
That’s one of the things learned from the final vote canvass that was approved by the Tooele County Commission in an 8:45 a.m. meeting Tuesday in its conference room at the Tooele County Building.
Voter turnout in the Nov. 6 general election in Tooele County reached 72 percent with 22,380 out of 31,297 voters returning a ballot, according to results compiled by Tooele County Clerk/Auditor Marilyn Gillette.
For comparison, voter turnout in the county’s general election in 2014 was 46 percent, Gillette said.
For most counties in Utah, including Tooele County, this was the first general election conducted with all vote by mail ballots, according to Gillette.
“Mail-in precincts have always had a higher voter participation rate,” she said. “That’s one reason we went to voting by mail.”
However, Gillette isn’t sure vote by mail should get all the credit for the large voter turnout.
“We also had a lot of ballot issues this year, like medical marijuana and the change of Tooele County’s form of government, that drew a lot of interest,” she said.
While all registered voters were mailed ballots, Gillette kept four polling location open throughout the county for voters on Election Day who either wanted to vote on Election Day or wanted to drop off their marked ballot. But the majority of voters chose to mark their ballots at home and return them before election day.
Out of the 22,380 ballots cast in the election, 17,586 of those were returned to the clerk’s office prior to Nov. 6. That left 4,794 of the ballots either cast or turned in on Election Day or postmarked before Election Day but received by mail after the election.
But even that amount of voters caused lines at polling places to move slowly.
One of the problems causing slow lines was another first for this election — Election Day voter registration.
Potential voters who were not registered were allowed to show identification and fill out a provisional ballot and vote under a new state law, according to Gillette.
With around 30,000 voters registered before Election Day in Tooele County, it looks like around 1,000 voters registered at the polls in the county on Election Day.
Another factor slowing down lines at the polls was a shortage of ballots.
“With the first vote by mail election, and the first Election Day registration, it was hard to estimate how many ballots to have available at each location,” Gillette said. “Some places had to wait for more ballots to be delivered.”
Voting by mail may also change the traditional timing of announcing election results, according to Gillette.
With the old electronic voting machines, election workers just needed to pull the memory card out of the machines and they were downloaded and counted. Counting mail-in ballots is more labor intensive, according to Gillette.
Each ballot envelope has to be scanned to record that it was received, the signature of the voter has to be verified, and then the envelope opened and the ballot removed, flattened and checked to make sure it is machine readable.
Envelopes and ballots, once separated are kept together so the number of ballots counted can be checked against the number of envelopes opened.
Ballots are then ran through the scanner in batches. Ballots that can’t be read by the scanner are adjudicated by an election worker to see the voter’s intent is evident.
Voters whose signatures can’t be verified must be contacted before their envelopes can be opened and counted. Problems with provisional ballots, including checking to make sure the voter didn’t vote somewhere else in the county or in the state, have to cleared up before a provisional ballot can be counted.
“The process just takes longer,” Gillette said, who sent out an email to all county employees asking for volunteers to come help open envelopes on Election Day.
With all new processes there are some problems that don’t show up until the first real time use of the process. One of those issues appeared at the tail end of the election cycle on the day of the final canvass.
According to state code, the Tooele County Commission, acting as the board of canvassers for the county general election, met two weeks after the election and reviewed the election results.
The county commission, along with Gillette, met on Tuesday morning in the commission’s conference room. Gillette spread out the 17 pages of the final election report on the conference table and the commissioners perused the report.
Tooele County Commission Chairman Wade Bitner observed that unexpectedly, Grantsville Justice Court Judge Ron Elton had received more “no” votes than “yes” votes.
The three commissioners continued to exam the report. Eventually a motion was made and passed to accept the report.
Less than 10 minutes after the beginning of the canvass meeting, the county commissioners and the clerk/auditor signed the canvass report certifying the report as “full, true, and correct.”
Once back in her office with the report, Gillette started to think about Bitner’s comment about the election results for the Grantsville Justice Court.
Taking a closer look at the report, Gillette noticed a few other unexpected results in judge races and in proposition election results.
Gillette discovered that when she pulled the data for the final election results and used it to populate the fields in the spreadsheet she used for the election night report, the data wasn’t in the same order as the data that was output on election night.
As a result, the vote counts were correct, but the column headings on some of the columns in the report were wrong.
For example, the results labeled as the Grantsville Justice Court election were the results for Proposition #16, and vice versa.
“We made a mistake,” Gillette said. “But we found it and corrected it before the results were published or reported to the Lieutenant Governor’s office.”
In the end, the final canvass changed nothing for Tooele County.
The two closest vote counts on election eve in Tooele County were for Proposition #6 — the change the form of county government proposition — and Proposition #16 — the raise sales tax to fund public transit proposition.
Election night ended with Prop #6 passing with a 53 percent “yes” vote and Prop #16 failing with a 53 percent “no” vote.
After the canvass, Prop #6 passed with a 53 percent “yes” vote and Prop #16 failed with a 53 percent “no” vote.
Another feature of the vote by mail software is that it calculates and makes available a vote report by precincts simultaneously with the final vote count. In the past the precinct vote count wasn’t available until several weeks after the final vote count.
Looking at the precinct vote count for County Commission Seat B, while Republican Kendall Thomas defeated Democrat Brenda Spearman county-wide by 13,514 votes to 8,401, Spearman held a slight lead in her home community with 2,099 votes from Stansbury Park to Thomas’ 2,070 votes in Stansbury Park.
Spearman, the Democrat, won Stansbury Park despite Stansbury’s apparent strong Republican leaning.
The straight Republican Party votes cast in Stansbury Park were twice the number of straight Democratic Party votes cast in Stansbury Park.
Stansbury Park voters also flexed their voting muscle to place two Stansbury Park residents on the Tooele County School Board.
Incumbent school board member Carol Jensen, from Erda, lost to Stansbury resident Melissa Rich, with 1,491 votes cast for Rich and 1,166 for Jensen in the School Board District #6 race.
Jensen won in Erda, 277 to 226, but lost in Stansbury Park, 889 to 1,265.
The school board District #5 race was an open race featuring Teresa McNeill of Grantsville and Camille Knudson of Stansbury Park.
McNeill won in the Grantsville precincts 817 to 417, but Knudson won in Stansbury Park 899 to 463. Knudson also picked up votes Lake Point and Wendover.
The complete, and correct, election results with precinct by precinct tallies will be available on the Tooele County Clerk’s website next Monday, Gillette said. The clerk’s website can be found at www.tooele.ut.us.
