Calvert says he’s winner and not worried about final count

By Dena Bunis, Orange County Register

November 6, 2008

Just got off the phone with Rep. Ken Calvert and he says while there are potentially tens of thousands of absentee and provisional ballots yet to be counted in Riverside and Orange counties, that he’s confident he was re-elected yesterday.

Here’s the breakdown of numbers that we know so far. There are about 150,000 absentee ballots still to be counted for all of Riverside County, which is by far where the bulk of Calvert’s constituents live. And there are about 48,000 provisional ballots.

Calvert said he doesn’t know yet how many of those ballots are in the 44th district. As of now Calvert is about 5,000 votes ahead district wide, thanks to a healthy plurality in Orange County. And he told me that while he was behind Democrat Bill Hedrick in the initial dump of votes Tuesday night - which traditionally are the absentee ballots - that in Riverside the early vote was counted together with the absentees. Early voting traditionally favors the Democrats and at least across the country that was especially true in this year’s election.

Calvert believes if the current trend of the vote split continues he will win, given his current vote cushion. We’ll keep on top of this today with the Registrar of Voters and try to find out when all this counting will start and how long it will take.

“I feel very confident that it’s over,’ Calvert said. “We;ll have to mop up the numbers at this point.”

But there’s obviously concern here. Both sides have reached out I’m told to lawyers expert in election law and I’m sure there will be many eyes on the process at the Registrar of Voters.

As for why Calvert lost his home county of Riverside, the Corona Republican said it was a case of the Democrats being more motivated to vote. The Democratic turnout - and that of the Decline to State voters, he said, was just greater than the Republicans.