After counting 75,000 absentee ballots , no changes were
made
Gilroy – Seventy-five thousand absentee and provisional ballots have been counted in the two weeks since election day, and not a single outcome in Santa Clara County has changed, according to the Registrar of Voters.
“I didn’t see anything that swung,” said registrar spokesman Matt Moreles. “Obviously they might have gone down or up a couple percentage points. In some cases people might have switched positions, but it hasn’t affected the overall outcome.”
In Campbell, for instance, the second and third place finishers in the city council race swapped positions, but the top three vote-getters remained the same group of people.
No changes took place in close races affecting Gilroy, including races for the governing boards of the Unified School District and the Santa Clara Valley Water District.
The top four finishers who claimed seats on to the GUSD board race – out of five candidates – are in the same position as election night, with incumbent Javier Aguirre leading the field, followed by Denise Apuzzo, incumbent Thomas Bundros, and Francisco Dominguez.
Rosemary Kamei managed to hold her seat on the water district board with a margin of about 1,250 votes, roughly the amount that separated her from political newcomer and water expert Ram Singh on election night.
Francisco Dominguez said he wasn’t worried about losing the fourth and final school board seat to fifth-place finisher Ardeshir Ghoreishi. On election night, the two were separated by about 600 or 700 votes, he said, and that gap ultimately widened to more than 800.
“I thought I campaigned pretty aggressively,” Dominguez said. “I did all the traditional things in terms of putting up signs, walking precincts and doing mail. It’s something I took very seriously. In terms of the results I think that’s what I expected to happen. There were two incumbents running and I assumed they’d get re-elected, and Ms. Apuzzo is a long-time community activist and she knows a lot of people.”
A thousand ballots are expected to be counted today and added to the overall tally online, Moreles said, adding that he did not expect any changes to the results. The registrar will conduct an “audit” of the election next week, before officially certifying the results. As a general safeguard, each election the registrar counts 1 percent of the ballots – a mix of absentee, provisional and the paper trail produced by electronic voting machines – to ensure a statistical match with the overall results. They also compare the number of signatures on voting precinct sign-in books to the number of ballots cast at each precinct, to make sure the numbers match up.
Of 750,000 registered voters in the county, 441,525 cast ballots in the recent election – a 58.9 percent turnout. The day after the election, the registrar estimated it had 55,000 uncounted ballots – most of them absentees mailed late or dropped off at polling places or provisional ballots filled out by people who voted at the wrong polling station or forgot to re-register after moving.
As of Tuesday, the final count of post-election ballots stood at 75,546.
