It's official: The Election Is Over.

Final votes in the recent Santa Clarita City Council election are in with no change to the results.

City Clerk Sharon Dawson and her staff counted the last of the provisional ballots Wednesday afternoon and Laurie Ender remained the top vote-getter with 6,180 (24.5% of votes cast); Bob Kellar with 6,135 (24.3%), Bob Spierer with 5,089 (20.2%), Diane Trautman with 4,959 (19.7%) and Maria Gutzeit with 2,800 (11.1%)

Only 17.2 percent of the eligible voters actually cast ballots, from a possible 82,253 registered voters in the city. Mail-in ballots (formerly known as absentee ballots) totaled 9,905, edging out precinct ballots by a 2-to-1 margin, comprising 12% of the votes with only 4,315 people (or 5.2 %) going to the polls.

Dawson said that the results of this election had the widest spread between precinct votes and absentee votes.

“Up until 1998, we had more precinct votes than absentee votes,” she said. “We switched to the Mail In Vote to make it more convenient for people in 2000 and the percentage has been growing ever since.”

Among the 120 poll workers who spent the day at 30 precincts waiting for voters to come in were high school student volunteers getting a first-hand look at the democratic process. Students were part of a program sponsored by the HartSchool
District; participants were age 16 or older, held a 3.0 or higher grade average and applied for the experience.

Ender and Kellar will be sworn in at a special City Council meeting at 4:30 p.m. April 22, after City Manager Ken Pulskamp makes a special presentation to Councilmember TimBen Boydston, who was appointed to temporarily fill the seat vacated by Cameron Smyth in 2007. A regular council meeting with a full agenda will follow at 6 p.m.