BISBEE — Early ballots are an increasingly popular choice of Cochise County voters.

In fact, almost half of the county’s votes were cast before the Nov. 4 Election Day.

Ballots cast by county residents in the general election were canvassed, or validated and entered into the public record, on Tuesday by the Board of Supervisors.

Tom Schelling, the county elections director, said of the total 49,390 ballots cast on Nov. 4, 21,167, or 42.8 percent, were early ballots mailed or delivered before Election Day.

Voter turnout was 69.86 percent as there are 70,700 registered voters in Cochise County.

Schelling is watching the trend of early ballots.

“It just keeps getting more and more,” he said Tuesday afternoon during an interview in his Old Bisbee office.

In a sense, he said, it is like having two elections. One is the traditional polling sites in the precincts, where votes are cast on Election Day. The second is the early ballots, cast before the election.

The precinct action includes the casting of provisional ballots for voters who did not provide a proper identification or whose names did not show up on the printouts of voter rolls. Verifying those ballots, and a number of early ballots, against signature cards in the Recorder’s Office took a number of days to process by county personnel.

These are two processes involving two sets of staff, which increases the costs.

“So something’s going to have to be looked at,” Schelling said.

He noted how Arizona voters overwhelmingly rejected a proposition in 2006 that would have changed the state’s balloting system to an all-mail-in one. Many early voters rejected that plan.

“I thought that was interesting,” Schelling said.

His goal is efficiency and cost-effectiveness.

Schelling was pleased with Arizona’s pioneering system of allowing military personnnel stationed overseas to cast ballots through an online system in which they can see the ballot via a portable document file, or PDF, transmitted over the Internet.

“I feel it was very successful,” Schelling said, noting more than 100 Cochise County ballots were cast by that method.

Troops got “a taste” of a modernized way of doing elections, he said.

“The door has been opened,” Schelling said.