Voter turn-out was so high on Tuesday that at least one Hermosa Beach polling place nearly ran out of ballots.
Precinct workers at the Easy Reader newspaper office, which has served as a polling place for the past decade, were issued 550 ballots. When the polls closed Tuesday night, just nine of the ballots remained, according to the precinct’s inspector Eric Bails .
Bails said other Hermosa polling places also reported running low on ballots.
His precinct’s rolls listed approximately 1,700 registered voters. The district runs west from Manhattan Avenue to the ocean and from 10th Street on the north to Herondo Avenue on the south.
Blair estimated the precinct’s turn-out at approximately 55 percent, as compared to just 12 percent during last June’s primary.
“Voters were lined up from 7 a.m. when we opened until 11 a.m., and again from 3 p.m. until we closed at 8 p.m. We were never without voters,” Blair said.
Had he run out of ballots, he said, voters would have been allowed to vote using the 150 yellow sample ballots provided to him by the county.
Approximately 430 of the 550 ordinary ballots were cast by voters at the Easy Reader office. (The other 120 ballots were damaged or unused). In addition, 105 provisional ballots were cast at the office, and 48 vote-by-mail (absentee ballots) were dropped off. Provisional ballots are those cast by voters whose names do not appear on the precinct list, generally because the voters have moved, or are registered in another precinct.
Approximately 350 of the precinct’s registered voters requested mail ballots, bringing the number of votes cast in the precinct to approximately 900 of the 1,700 registered voters.. ER
