Closer Look At How The Valley Voted ... Or Didn't Vote

POLO recently issued a press release saying that the “Santa Ynez Valley says NO to expansion of gambling”. POLO based this statement on the results of checking the returns of Props 94-97 on each of the individual precincts in the valley from the Feb 5 election. The results indeed indicated about a 60-40 vote opposed to the props by those who voted. That’s the key phrase here… those who voted.

Crunching the numbers reveals that it is hardly an indication of how the majority of the valley looks at gambling and gaming.

The estimated population of the valley is about 22,000. Only about half of those are registered voters, and only about half of those actually voted on Feb 5. Of those who did vote, about 2300 voted “YES” and about 3900 voted ‘NO” on the 4 gaming props. The “NO’ votes represent about 17% of the total population of our valley.

For POLO to infer that the entire Santa Ynez Valley (they do this you know, they like to talk like they are speaking for everyone in the valley) does not want the four tribes with amended compacts to expand their gaming operations is a gross misconception. I think a more accurate statement by POLO would be the following.

“The large majority of the people in our valley just don’t seem to care one way or the other”

On a side note... as I went through the different precincts I noticed that Ballard had 830 or so registered voters. Now, Wikipedia has little Ballard down for 7,987 for a population which we all know cannot be correct, but really I had no idea Ballard's population had grown so much as to have 800+ registered voters. Where do they all live? Underground? Anyone who can shed some light on this please do so.