Only 50 votes separate the bottom three candidates running for
school board, and with provisional ballots yet to be counted, the
numbers could change.
Only 50 votes separate the bottom three candidates running for school board, and with provisional ballots yet to be counted, the numbers could change.
After remaining neck and neck through election night with the three other candidates vying for three spots on the school board, Fred Tovar, a newcomer to the board, pulled significantly ahead with all precincts reporting.
Mark Good, former trustee and former Gilroy police officer, and the two incumbents, Rhoda Bress in third place and Jaime Rosso in fourth place, are separated by 50 votes – or 0.19 percentage points. The Santa Clara County Registrar of Voters still had more than 150,000 vote-by-mail and provisional ballots to count countywide as of Wednesday afternoon, said Elma Rosas, registrar spokeswoman. She did not immediately have the number of Gilroy votes left to be counted.
But Gilroy has 18,234 registered voters – part of the 788,821 registered voters countywide – and she expected that enough votes to change the order of the candidates are still out there, she said. Good and Bress are separated by only six votes.
With 7,191 votes, Tovar, 39, earned more than 700 votes more than Good who held his own in second place with 6,431 votes. Bress had 6,425 votes and Rosso garnered 6,381 votes.
Tovar took the day after the elections off to recover from the weeks of campaigning leading up to the elections.
“Mentally, I’m drained,” he said. “For the last three months, my little group and I have been walking every one of the precincts and having weekend barbecues at the local parks. We must have gone to every house in Gilroy.”
“But it was worth it,” he continued. “It was good to go out there and meet the members of the community.”
Meanwhile, Good, 50, is spending a long week “in the middle of nowhere, Idaho,” he said in an interview last week. He had planned a hunting trip months ago and wouldn’t be back in time for the elections. He was not available by phone.
Pleased that the numbers seemed to be in her favor, Bress, 57, said she’s ready for a second term on the board but was saddened that Rosso may not be serving his third term in tandem.
“Personally, it was a wonderful opportunity to work with Jaime Rosso,” Bress said. “He is a tremendous asset to the district and put his heart and soul into improving this district.”
Although Rosso, 56, was hoping for a third term, he said if the electorate voted otherwise, that it will be nice to leave on a high note, with the passage of Measure P – the $150 million school bond that will build Christopher High School, the city’s second high school.
“I served two terms and would liked to have served another to see that we’ve met all our goals, but if the voters see otherwise, I can appreciate that,” he said. “I was surprised that both Rhoda and I were at the end, but what’s more important is that the district is moving ahead and making a lot of progress.”
Instead of breaking down the amount of votes left to be counted for each city in the county, Rosas said election officials are focussing on getting the record number of ballots counted. She said about 85 percent of the electorate voted Tuesday, as expected. The area encompassed by the school district includes 41 precincts, 20 of which are designated ‘mail ballot only’ precincts. Precincts are designated mail ballot only when they contain 250 or fewer voters, Rosas said. Though all the precincts have been counted, the registrar’s office is still tallying the thousands of vote-by-mail and provisional ballots.
The first update to the registrar’s Web site included 18 mail ballot precincts that gave a snapshot of results that held steady throughout the rest of the evening.
“In the past, we’d see more changes in the results as more ballots came in,” Rosas said. With more people submitting their ballots by mail, however, a wider sample is gathered and the registrar is able to report those number early on.
“We’re seeing a lot of the results earlier on now,” she said.
