Candidates John Horner and Tara Bevington remain in a hotly contested race for Morgan Hill Unified School District’s Trustee Area 2 seat, with the latest count giving Chamber of Commerce president Horner a 24-vote lead, according to the Santa Clara County Registrar of Voters.
With 3,361 votes counted in Trustee Area 2, as of Nov. 27, and with daily updates still being posted by county election officials since the Nov. 6 election, Horner (37.96 percent/1,276 votes) and Bevington (37.25 percent/1,252 votes) could be headed to an automatic ballot recount.
If the final margin of victory is less than 25 votes, or less than 0.25 percent of the ballots cast, an automatic manual recount is required, according to the county’s updated election policy.
The automatic recount policy was amended by the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors in 2018. It applies to all elections that take place in the county, excluding San Jose, which would use a machine to process a recount.
Trustee Area 2 was a four-candidate race with Enrique Navarro-Donnellan and James B. Dill also on the ballot, but neither is still considered in the running.
This is the second election cycle in which the local school district’s board members were elected using a trustee area format rather than an at-large pool of candidates. In the current system, only those individuals who reside within a particular trustee area can run for that office and only those individuals who live in that same area can take part in the vote.
The other four MHUSD races have clear winners: Wendy Sullivan (who leads Peter Mandel by 117 votes in TA1); Vanessa Sutter (for a two-year term in TA5); Carol Gittens (four years in TA4) and Heather Orosco, who ran unopposed in Trustee Area 3.
Mugs of John Horner and Tara Bevington in Mugshots
