Vote margin in Creswell balloting grows.

Byline: Randi Bjornstad The Register-Guard

Supporters of forming a library district in the Creswell area should breathe a little easier, after votes tallied Tuesday increased their margin over "no" voters to 22, up from 12 a day earlier.

Annette Newingham, elections manager for Lane County, said she doubts that lead can be overcome with only about 500 more ballots countywide to be counted.

"We're winding down, and that's good," Newingham said late Tuesday. If the library measure ends up with a margin of fewer than eight votes, a recount would be triggered automatically, but at this point Newingham considers that unlikely.

As elections workers continued working on the "problem" ballots from the Nov. 2 election, voter turnout in the county inched up over the 90 percent mark Tuesday.

Statewide, the turnout stands now at 85 percent, according to Nancy Ferry in the elections division of the Secretary of State's office.

Even that's not a record turnout; Ferry said 86.5 percent of registered voters went to the polls in November 1960, when John Kennedy eked out a narrow victory over Richard Nixon.

Newingham hasn't compiled records back that far yet but says this year's balloting exceeds turnout back to 1975. The second-highest rate of voting since then occurred in 1992, when 84.9 percent of voters turned out in the Bill Clinton vs. George H.W. Bush race.

Close as it appears, the Creswell library measure can't match the razor-thin difference of the votes cast in Lane County on Ballot Measure 36, which easily passed statewide and defines marriage as only legal between a man and a woman.

The measure failed only in Benton and Multnomah counties, but at this point the vote in Lane County has narrowed even further as vote counting continues, to 50.02 percent in favor and 49.98 percent against.

Newingham has until 5 p.m. Friday to iron out problems experienced by would-be voters, such as verifying signatures that appear not to match and determining voter eligibility of people who did not receive ballots because of changes of address.

After that, she has until Nov. 22 to certify the election as complete and final.

The biggest headache remaining for elections workers involves counting write-in votes for a position on a soil and water conservation district board in which no one filed to run for office but more than 12,000 people penned in suggestions for the post.

"We have to hand tally every name, and it's really time consuming," Newingham said. "Some people think it's funny to write someone in, but they don't realize we have to go through them all and count it."

She and other elections clerks throughout the state would like to see a change in state law when it comes to elective positions that don't attract candidates, Newingham said.

"If no one files, we'd like to see the position filled by appointment until the next election - that would do away with this problem," she said. "People sometimes think it's funny to do something like that, but it can create a lot of extra work afterward."