SALEM - Election officials were preparing to tally mail ballots today in a special election that has drawn big spending by interest groups but a lackluster voter turnout on a cigarette tax hike and a rollback of a 2004 property rights law.

“It’s sort of crawling up there, but it’s still looking pretty anemic,” state Election Director John Lindback said Monday of the turnout.

Despite all of the TV advertising and the significance of the two measures, 38 percent of registered voters had turned in their mail ballots by Monday morning — well below turnout levels at this stage of comparable special elections in recent years.

The voting deadline is 8 p.m. Tuesday. Postmarks don’t count, so at this point ballots must be delivered by hand to county election offices or to official ballot drop boxes.

Campaign contributions for and against the two ballot measures have soared to $22.3 million, well ahead of the amount spent on 10 initiatives on the November 2006 ballot.

The biggest chunk of spending is the nearly $12 million that the tobacco industry has poured into the campaign to try to kill Measure 50, the 84.5 cent-a-pack cigarette tax hike to pay for children’s health insurance.

Sarah Wetherson, an analyst with the election watchdog group Democracy Reform Oregon, said no one should be surprised by that amount, given that the tobacco industry spent millions to defeat cigarette taxes in California and Missouri last year.

“The have the ability to spend the money, and the self interest, and so they do,” Wetherson said.

Despite the tobacco industry’s lopsided financial advantage and the flood of ads it has put on Oregon’s airwaves, Measure 50 backers said they are not giving up on the cigarette tax plan to extend coverage to 100,000 uninsured Oregon children.

“We’ve got something the tobacco industry can’t buy — and that’s volunteers, out on the streets, knocking on doors, and calling Oregon voters. And they are going to keep doing that until 8 p.m. Tuesday,” said Cathy Kaufmann, spokeswoman for the Health Kids campaign.

No independent public opinion polls have been issued on Measure 50.

However, a spokesman for a tobacco-funded opposition campaign said he felt the advertising of the past few weeks has been successful.

“There was a lot of built-in voter support for the measure, so we had our work cut out for us” in raising voter doubts about various elements of the cigarette tax hike, J.L. Wilson said.

Though not quite as well-funded, the campaigns for and against Measure 49, the property rights revision, have produced a sizable number of TV ads as well.

Conservation groups are backing Measure 49. They say it would protect Oregon’s open spaces by scaling back the 2004 property rights law that requires governments to let people use their land however they could have when they bought it or pay for lost value.

But opponents of Measure 49, which would allow rural landowners to build a few homes — three in most cases — but curb larger developments, say it thwarts the will of voters who approved the 2004 law.