Jeff Pelline's Sierra Foothills Report

The local GOP has been “very active” in monitoring the elections, Barry Pruett writes on his blog.

“In addition to observers watching the testing on the voting machines prior to election day, the local party has a poll watcher at every consolidated precinct today,” Pruett writes.

Pruett, you will recall, lost the race for clerk-recorder in the June primary. He is active in the local GOP.

His blog goes on to discuss a “list of problems” with some of the voting machines (“or scanners as the report was not clear which”).

From the looks of it, the problems were minor and routine.

Barry also recommends that people call the county GOP headquarters “if you have any questions.”

We voted separately at the Nevada City Vets Hall on the electronic voting machine. It was routine and there were no problems.

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Here’s a trailer for the 2011 Wild & Scenic Film Festival in Nevada City. Read about the festival in the digital edition of Sierra FoodWineArt magazine at SierraCulture.com (click on orange icon to read the fall issue and go to page 31). We’ll put the trailer on the site too.

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•Goomba’s in Grass Valley: Republicans. 8 p.m.-10 p.m. Suggested donation is $10 per person to help cover the costs. Pay at the door by make a reservation by calling local GOP headquarters at 273-5107, nevadacountygop.org reads.
•Holbrooke Hotel in Grass Valley: Democrats. 8 p.m. It’s First Tuesday Democrats having an election party. Desserts will be served. There will be a screen to watch the returns, a TV and computers.
•National Hotel in Nevada City. 7 p.m. Ben Emery for Congress and Tina Vernon for Treasurer/Tax Collector campaigns on the second floor. Cash bar. Watch the election returns.

(BTW, photos from Vernon’s fundraising event at Rincon del Rio, posted on her campaign website on Facebook, are here. “We didn’t want to do another boring $100 sit-down rubber chicken dinner,” said the event planner.)

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More than 38 percent of the voters in our county have already cast their ballots, according to the Elections Office.

The county has received 23,635 ballots (including 8,322 from Democrats, 10,772 from Republicans and 3,501 from non-partisans) out of a total of 61,481 registered voters.

All told 43,566 vote-by-mail ballots were issued. Many voters wait until Election Day to bring them to the polls or Elections Office.

The election statistics are here.

Some other details:

•For our county, election results will be posted here. This includes the county race for Treasurer/Tax Collector, as well as the council races for the City of Grass Valley and Town of Truckee. A county Twitter feed is here.

•For our state, election results will be posted here. A version for your mobile phone is here.

•To find your polling place in our county, go here.

The Union is promoting live coverage of the elections via a link on its website. Yubanet also posts real-time results. I will report them on this blog as well.

In an editorial — on Election Day, no less — The Union’s editor/publisher is bashing one of the candidates for the Grass Valley City Council.

“Take Ed Yarborough, for example. Ed is running for city council again because he thinks most members of the current council are ‘liberal witches’ who perform ‘black magic’ (he promises to bring ‘white magic’ to the council) and believes Grass Valley’s biggest problem is illegal immigration, which is why he used to stand out in front of the Catholic church and protest bilingual services. Grass Valley has a lot of problems, but illegal immigration isn’t one of them. So, please … don’t vote for Ed.”

A plan for Minnesota pastors to endorse candidates from the pulpit is here. One of them taunted the “liberal media” to file an IRS complaint against the church. “Do it out of hatred for me,” he urged.

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Voters are headed to the polls, including here in the foothills, where the polls are open from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m.

“With around 100 of the 435 House seats at stake considered ‘in play,’ or competitive, the anti-Democratic mood is predicted to result in big Republican gains,” as CNN reports. “On the Senate side, where 37 of the 100 seats are being contested, the majority will be decided by key races in Nevada, Washington, and a few other states where Democratic incumbents face strong challenges.”

Here are some trends:

•A Field poll predicts 55 percent of registered voters in California are expected to turn out to vote, according to the Bee. Twelve of California’s past 13 gubernatorial elections have had voter turnouts higher than the 55 percent projected today.

•Placer County is projecting voter turnout today of about 74 percent; El Dorado County, 70 percent; Sacramento County, 60 percent; and Yolo County, between 45 percent and 50 percent.

•A record number of voters have cast early ballots for a midterm election. The total number of early votes has topped 16 million, according to the Washington Post. In California, more mail ballots than precinct votes are expected to be cast.

•This bitter campaign season will cost more than $3.5 billion, the most expensive non-presidential vote ever, according to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics, a watchdog group.

•On the day before Election Day, phone service went out at Democratic and Republican filed offices in New Hampshire — and a spike in campaign robocalls may have been the culprit.

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“A lot has changed in American politics since Republican presidential nominee Bob Dole gave out an incorrect address for his website at the end of one of his 1996 debates with Bill Clinton,” writes Sree Sreenivasan, a Columbia journalism professor in a report for DNAInfo.com. “What a difference 14 years make. The web, various digital tools and social media, are integral parts of campaigns at all levels.”

I’ve known Sree since I worked at CNET in the mid-’90s. He’s been a pioneer in watching the changing media landscape.

Here’s a list worth noting, according to Sree. You might want to bookmark some of them to track the election returns. The Twitter feature lets you track how many Tweets are being directed at political candidates (Carly Fiorina and Christine O’Donnell are high on the list).

•NYTIMES.COM: The NYT deploys its digital teams to do smart work during big projects, and the election is no exception. “The Election Will Be Tweeted (And Retweeted)” is a way to see how many tweets are coming from (and being directed at) political candidates across the country over the last couple of weeks of the election. “Election Results 2010″ is an interactive way of keeping track of the results for the Senate, House and state races (click on the tabs along the top).

•FOURSQUARE’S “I VOTED” PROJECT“: Geolocation service Foursquare (I wrote about the “check-in wars” recently) has launched a project to track people who say they’ve voted. The explanation: “The I Voted data visualization and badge have been designed with three purposes in mind: to encourage civic participation, increase transparency in the voting process and develop a replicatable system for the 2012 Presidential Election.”

•HUFFINGTON POST ELECTION DASHBOARD: This features an easy-to-understand interactive map that shows you everything from polling data to social media mentions.

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