Four weeks after voters countywide cast their ballots in this year’s June primary, the vote tally has been officially signed, sealed, and delivered and the final results etched in stone. Assuming the new ballot-sorting machine the county elections division has just secured works as promised, final election results should be available much sooner in November’s general election. The new machine, purchased with a $300,000 grant from State of California to expedite election results would have been able to count all 111,710 mail-in ballots cast this June within 48 hours, maybe even faster, according to Martin Cabos, the county’s Deputy Registrar of voters.
The amount of time it’s taken California counties to count their ballots and ratify their election results has emerged as yet another hot-button issue between the Stare of California and President Donald Trump, who has been quick to equate the state’s notoriously slow vote counting with voter fraud. In a related case, the Supreme Court ruled against Trump this week and decreed states will still be allowed to count votes that come in late so long as there’s documentation they were cast within the voting deadline.
According to Cabos, 2,300 ballots in the county were disqualified because they came in after the filing deadline; another 700 had irregularities that were not cured by the voter. None, he said, showed evidence of a faked signature.
For an off-year primary election with no fewer than 61 gubernatorial candidates on the ballot, voter turnout — 44.6 percent — was much healthier than predicted. Democratic voters, fearful that two MAGA Republican candidates might make it to the November run-off as the top two vote-getters, held back until the bitter end. In Santa Barbara, gubernatorial candidate Tom Steyer, the billionaire climate change and anti-oil crusader, came in first by a 5 percent margin over his closes rival Xavier Becerra. Statewide, Steyer came in third and will not make the November run-off. That race will pit Beccera, a Democratic Party stalwart with 30 years in the party trenches in various positions, against MAGA commentator Steve Hilton.
In local races, the big news was that longshot outsider Luis Esparaza beat longtime incumbent Thomas Adams for judge by 3,000 votes. This marks the first time in 50 years an incumbent judge has been defeated by a challenger in Santa Barbara.
The other upset belonged to Melinda Greene, a longtime administrator with the Clerk-Recorder office, who took on her boss and longtime incumbent Joe Holland. Holland has been hobbled by chronic health issues that have kept him out of the office for 18 months and mounted no campaign. Greene, endorsed by Democrats and Republicans alike and pretty much any organization inclined to make endorsements, won with 60 percent of the vote.
