After counting 75,000 absentee ballots , no changes were
made
Morgan Hill – Seventy-five thousand absentee and provisional ballots have been counted in the two weeks since Election Day, and not a single outcome in Santa Clara County has changed, according to the Registrar of Voters.
“I didn’t see anything that swung,” said registrar spokesman Matt Moreles. “Obviously they might have gone down or up a couple percentage points. In some cases people might have switched positions, but it hasn’t affected the overall outcome.”
In Campbell, for instance, the second and third place finishers in the city council race swapped positions, but the top three vote-getters remained the same group of people.
No changes took place in close races affecting Morgan Hill, including races for the governing boards of the Morgan Hill Unified School District, the Santa Clara Valley Water District and the Morgan Hill city council and mayoral race.
The top four finishers who claimed seats on to the MHUSD board race – out of five candidates – are in the same position as election night.
Out of the five city council candidates, councilman Greg Sellers was the top vote getter followed by graphic designer Marby Lee. They received 32 and 21 percent of the votes cast, respectively. Councilman Steve Tate won the mayor’s seat by receiving 59 percent of the votes compared to Dennis Delisle’s 41 percent.
Lee, who has lived in Morgan Hill for 10 years, has frequently attended city council meetings this year and has criticized the city’s financial practices, was relieved after her victory appeared certain.
Tate and Delisle were the only ones to throw their hats in the ring to run for mayor in the most watched and commented on race in recent years – there hasn’t been a mayoral race in which outgoing mayor Dennis Kennedy was not a contender since 1996.
Rosemary Kamei managed to hold her seat on the water district board with a margin of about 1,250 votes, roughly the amount that separated her from political newcomer and water expert Ram Singh on election night.
A thousand ballots are expected to be counted Wednesday and added to the overall tally online, Moreles said, adding that he did not expect any changes to the results. The registrar will conduct an “audit” of the election next week, before officially certifying the results. As a general safeguard, each election the registrar counts 1 percent of the ballots – a mix of absentee, provisional and the paper trail produced by electronic voting machines – to ensure a statistical match with the overall results. They also compare the number of signatures on voting precinct sign-in books to the number of ballots cast at each precinct, to make sure the numbers match up.
Of 750,000 registered voters in the county, 441,525 cast ballots in the recent election – a 58.9 percent turnout. The day after the election, the registrar estimated it had 55,000 uncounted ballots – most of them absentees mailed late or dropped off at polling places or provisional ballots filled out by people who voted at the wrong polling station or forgot to re-register after moving.
As of Tuesday, the final count of post-election ballots stood at 75,546.
Serdar Tumgoren, Senior Staff Writer, covers City Hall for The Dispatch. Reach him at 847-7109 or st*******@************ch.com.
