With vote by mail ballots received through Sunday counted and all precincts reporting, county election officials expect there are still between 4,500 and 5,500 outstanding vote-by-mail ballots that arrived Monday and Tuesday of this week and might sway the results of some of the closer races.
“We really – because of the volume of ballots still remaining – we can’t predict which way it’s going to go,” said Angela Curro, the assistant county clerk recorder for the registrar of voters, as she reflected on some of the closer contests. “It could go either way on some of these races.”
Perhaps the closest local race was the contest between Mickie Solorio Luna and Victoria Montoya for a seat on Hollister’s City Council. The latest round of results released at 12:27 a.m. Wednesday morning showed all precincts reporting and only a 23-vote difference between candidates. Luna held a lead of 396 votes compared to Montoya’s 373 votes. That amounts to 51.03 percent of the vote for Luna compared to 48.07 percent for Montoya.
Another close contest was the race for the District 4 county board seat between Jerry Muenzer and Victor Gomez, where the difference between candidates came down to 54 votes in the most recent set of results released early Wednesday morning. Muenzer had 1,224 votes compared to Gomez’s 1,170 votes. That’s an advantage of 51.04 percent to 48.79 percent.
Measure H – the county’s effort to get the vehicle abatement program renewed another 10 years, which needed two-thirds approval to pass – was also close. With all precincts reporting by early Wednesday morning at 12:27 a.m., the measure had 66.9 percent of the vote.
The current voter turn out is 37.04 percent but that’s counting only Election night votes and the mail-in ballots that were turned in by Sunday. Of these initial results, 20.35 percent were vote-by-mail ballots and 16.69 percent were Election Day poll results. Curro anticipates thousands more vote-by-mail ballots were received by mail or dropped off at the office and polling stations on Monday and Tuesday. Factoring in those ballots could dramatically affect the county’s overall voter turnout numbers.
“We could probably hit a 60 percent turnout for all of the county,” she said. “It could be anywhere from 55 to 60 percent.”
About 350 provisional ballots are also being reviewed for eligibility. The county has a history of finding between 65 and 75 percent of provisional ballots to be countable, Curro said.
“It just takes research. We just have to make sure that they really are eligible to be counted,” she said.
