Things could be looking postive for candidates who came up
short
Gilroy – Candidates who narrowly lost elections this week have been offered a glimmer of hope in the form of 55,000 uncounted ballots.
The Santa Clara County Registrar of Voters announced Thursday it had tens of thousands of absentee, provisional and paper ballots left to count. The vast majority are absentee, while a smaller portion are provisional ballots handed out to people who arrived at the wrong polling station or forgot to re-register after changing addresses.
Conventional political wisdom holds that conservative voters tend to use absentee ballots, suggesting there is little hope of a turnaround for Measure A, a restrictive land-use measure defeated by more than 7,000 votes in the face of strong opposition by farmers, property owners and Realtors.
A smaller margin of 1,240 votes separate water expert Ram Singh from claiming the seat of Rosemary Kamei, a three-term incumbent on the Santa Clara Valley Water District’s board of directors. On Friday, Singh said he had not yet given up all hope of winning the District 1 seat, which covers the area from Los Gatos to the tip of South County.
“I was going to send an e-mail congratulating her, but I held back and said I’d wait till I have more definite results,” Singh said. “If there are 50,000 ballots to be counted, at least 10,000 are from our district. Those can make a substantial difference.”
The registrar plans to update vote counts every Wednesday and Friday at 5pm, after election officials have sifted through thousands of ballots and verified that signatures match up with those on voter registration cards. The registrar has until Dec. 5 to finish the verification process and certify a final tally.
As of 5:30pm Friday, Kamei held a 50.8 to 49.2 percent advantage, with 38,487 votes in her corner compared to 37,272 for Singh.
Kamei said she was checking the online updates but that she was not worried about a reversal.
‘I’m not nervous,” she said. “I did a lot of work, talked to a lot of people, and it’s very gratifying to be given the privilege to serve the people again.”
The registrar issued 270,487 absentee ballots for Tuesday’s mid-term election – a spike of nearly 40,000 since the 2004 presidential race. In past years, more than 90 percent of absentee ballots and between 80 and 90 percent of provisional ballots have been found to be valid.
