We received a 47 absentees in the mail today.  3 were postmarked after the deadline so won’t be counted.  Of the others we have 23 Democratic and 21 Republican ballots in.  One of the Democratic ballots is a Federal only ballot so it won’t affect the Governor’s race.

As I mentioned in my post yesterday, the chances of affirmatively requested absentees being returned is much higher than the automatic absentees.  That’s bearing out here as 19 out of the 21 Republican ballots were from voters who made a request specifically for this election.  Two were from military people.

Two additions to my post yesterday.  First, we may receive even fewer late overseas ballots because we were able to get them out a little earlier than in some previous years.  Second, I believe it’s five of those outstanding absentee voters actually showed up and voted on election day.

I’ve talked with a few people about how many absentees will be returned in time to be counted in the February 16 canvass of votes.  I looked at the 2008 primary for some basis.  In the 2008 primary we had 86 absentee ballots that were counted after election day.  That was out of 209 absentees that were outstanding.

But further breaking that down demonstrates how important it is to know what types of absentees are outstanding.  Absentee ballots automatically sent to the military and overseas voters were returned at a 59% rate that election and just 23% of those outstanding on the day of the election ended up showing up in time to be counted.

Ballots that were affirmatively requested by voters were returned at an overall rate of 91% and 60% of those outstanding on election day were returned in time to be counted.

Dividing the absentees that way and applying those rates of return, we can anticipate about 47 absentee ballots being returned and counted on the 16th.  I have no idea about the number of provisional ballots.

With the Republican’s Governor’s race hanging by a few hundred votes, and other races that are close, many people are asking about when to expect the final results in Champaign County and how they could change.

We will begin our final canvass process here at the Brookens Center on February 16, 2010 at 10:00 am.  It will begin by having judges validate absentee ballots and then feeding those ballots and the validated provisional ballots into tabulators.  After all the absentee ballots have been tabulated, we will add those results into the election day results and release them.

Currently in Champaign County there are 139 Republican absentee ballots and 337 Democratic ballots  that have been mailed but not returned.  There are 14 Republican provisional ballots and 9 Democratic provisional ballots.  How many of the provisional ballots will be counted is yet to be decided.  These numbers might be a little misleading because they include all automatically sent ballots to military and overseas voters, some of whom may have had no intention to vote.

The count of outstanding ballots that have been sent to voters who affirmatively requested a ballot for this election is 35 Democratic and 40 Republican.  I would estimate that the return rate on those ballots will be high.

We will be picking up ballots at the post office on Thursday of this week, Monday of next week, and Tuesday the day of the canvass.  I will release the count of ballots received by our office on the Thursday and Monday to give people an idea of how many of those ballots have been returned.

Please let us know any thoughts you have on how election day went for you.  Also, any comments about the preprinted voter applications and undervote would be appreciated as well.