Empty Booths, But Big Voter Turnout in Northwest Mission Viejo

At 3 p.m. Tuesday afternoon, nine voting booths sat empty at the Aliso Villa Clubhouse in Northwest Mission Viejo. But the quiet clubhouse with nobody inside but three volunteer poll workers may have seen more activity than it let on.

By 3 p.m. there had been 58 walk-in voters, but several uncounted "mail-in" ballots were slipped inside a sealed box as well.

"I've never seen so many vote-by-mails," said Kathy Miramontes, who secured the location for this year's primary vote.

The clubhouse is the meeting place for two precincts making up 825 total registered voters. The poll workers took bets on how many of those would show by the end of the day. 85? 90? 105?

Those guesses if true would bring the total number of voters to about 9 to 13 percent of the registered total. But that doesn't count the mail-in voters, which could have been double, Miramontes guessed.

That would be significantly higher than the county average of 12.4 percent, based on Orange County Registrar figures with 352 of 1976 precincts reporting.

The Aliso Villa Clubhouse had another distinction Tuesday—they were the first in the region to try out a special parking space monitoring system for disabled voters. The space is outfitted with a button that alerts poll workers to disabled drivers in need of assistance.

The parking space had not been used by 3 p.m., though, Miramontes said.