As more ballots are tallied, the picture of who will be on the
school board is becoming clearer.
As more ballots are tallied, the picture of who will be on the school board is becoming clearer.
With about 50,000 ballots left to be counted countywide, school board hopeful and Stanford administrator Fred Tovar, with 8,734 votes, widened his first place lead by 854 votes in the race for the Gilroy Unified School District Board of Trustees. Incumbent Rhoda Bress jumped from third to second place with a 107-vote lead over Mark Good, a former trustee. She trailed Good by six votes before the latest registrar’s update Friday afternoon. Incumbent Jaime Rosso trails Good by 82 votes.
Bress garnered 7,880 votes, Good has 7,773 and Rosso has 7,691.
According to a spokeswoman from the registrar of voters, officials still have to count 25,000 absentee ballots and 27,000 provisional ballots.
About 40,000 votes were added to the tally Friday afternoon, Spokeswoman Elma Rosas said, adding that she wasn’t certain when the tally would be finished. The county registrar’s office has 28 days to count and certify the ballots.
“I don’t want to guarantee anything earlier than that,” Rosas said. “We don’t know what we’re going to run into. We try to do it as quickly as we can but our priority is to make sure the election is accurate and that every vote counts.”
Although she did not have numbers specific to Gilroy, she said she expects that enough votes are still out there to potentially shake up the Gilroy school board race.
Of the 40,000 countywide ballots added Friday afternoon, about 1,900 were from Gilroy, assuming that each voter chose three school board candidates.
Using similar calculations, of the 50,000 countywide ballots left to tally, 2,000 could be from Gilroy and these votes could change the election results.
Another update will be posted on the registrar’s Web site Monday but it is unclear when the final numbers will come through, Rosas said.