The votes are in: Santa Cruz wants growth. But why does it now take so long to count ballots? 

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Well, the early results are in from the March 5 Super Tuesday primary election. And with the important caveat that the election is not over until every vote has been counted, it is pretty clear that the age of no-growth in Santa Cruz is over.

In the city of Santa Cruz, Measure M – a proposition that would have subjected taller buildings, and virtually any project that required variances from the zoning code, to a citizen vote and imposed stricter affordability requirements on housing projects – appears to be going down to defeat at a 60%-40% margin. Most local political pundits had predicted a closer race, but the message here is clear and decisive: Don’t do anything that stands in the way of constructing more housing in Santa Cruz.

It’s still early, but it also appears that all of the candidates who associated themselves with Yes on Measure M (Hector Marin, Joy Schendledecker, Joe Thompson) are likely going down to defeat in this election. There are other complexities and nuances in terms of how these elections played out, and I will write about that next week when we have a higher percentage of the votes actually tabulated.

Santa Cruz city and county demonstrated continuing status as progressive communities with the likely passage of Measures K and L, two half-cent sales tax measures that the city and county will use for general government purposes. Despite the regressive nature of sales taxes, apparently local voters realize the state has taken away many more progressive tax options – such as income taxes and property taxes – from local governments. Sales taxes are, therefore, the most logical choice if one wants to fund things like social services in general and homeless services in particular, as well as disaster recovery and climate adaptation and other environmental programs.

In Watsonville, voters appear to be narrowly supporting Measure N, a ballot choice that will help fund a community hospital that has gone from being a corporate entity to a nonprofit-run health center. But we still need to see if it maintains the two-thirds threshold to pass. 

In every school district in Santa Cruz County with a measure on the ballot, every bond or sales tax measure appears to be passing handily.

With respect to the three seats open on the Santa Cruz County Board of Supervisors, Manu Koenig in District 1, the only incumbent running in the March primary, appears to headed for a victory, and in District 5, Monica Martinez, endorsed by current Supervisor Bruce McPherson, is likely the top vote-getter, although probably headed for a runoff in November because a majority was hard to obtain with four candidates in the race.

In District 2, the two leading candidates will almost certainly be current Capitola Mayor Kristen Brown and social services activist and longtime Pajaro Valley Unified School District board member Kim DeSerpa, who will likely face off in November.

These numbers offer evidence that voters across the districts favor candidates with government experience or support from those who have had it. This was not an election of unhappy voters attempting to “throw the bums out.”  

Again, let me emphasize that what I write here is based on early returns and not definitive. I will provide a more complete analysis of why certain candidates succeeded in a column next week when we have more complete results.

However, one real question nagging at voters right now is why it takes so long to count the votes and get final results in our elections. This is not just a problem in Santa Cruz County, but throughout the state.

With modern electronic readers, all of the ballots could be counted by a machine in no more than an hour or so. 

In Santa Cruz, through most of the 1990s at least, candidates and their supporters waited in the basement of the Santa Cruz County Building at 701 Ocean St. on election day until about 11 p.m., when we got final election results.

This year, election officials say final certification of the vote in Santa Cruz from this March 5 primary will not take place until April. 

What is going on now to make it take so long to count votes?

I think it will take a while for Tricia Webber, our current county clerk, to become the extraordinary clerk that Gail Pellerin, her predecessor, who is lined up to win a second term in the state Assembly in November, was. But I don’t think the slow vote count is a problem with who is overseeing it. Webber and her staff are doing a credible job of handling elections.

The biggest factor in this problem is the explosion of vote-by-mail. 

It used to be that only a small, almost trivial number of voters asked for “absentee ballots” they could cast by mail. People too frail to go to the polls or who planned to be out of town on election day were the primary users of these absentee ballots. Now, since the pandemic, every voter gets a mail-in ballot and that is the way most citizens vote.

When people voted in person at polling places up until the 1990s, they provided proof of identity as a registered voter and then went into the voting booth to cast a ballot. Because there could be confidence that every ballot was legally cast, the county clerk needed only to run the machine-prepped ballots through a card reader on election night after the polls closed in order to get a final vote count.

But since the 1990s, election officials don’t require ID if you vote in person. They verify signatures. They do this for each ballot collected, whether it is mailed in or dropped off at a ballot collection box or walked into the county clerk’s office. This requires individual hand reading by a county clerk employee or certified volunteer before the ballot can be tabulated. As you can imagine, this takes a long time with so many ballots.

But here is the real problem. The vast majority of voters mail in their ballots not throughout the month before election day, but on or close to election day. The Santa Cruz County clerk received 22,000 ballots on election day. But California law now also allows ballots to be accepted for up to seven days after election day if they are postmarked by 8 p.m. on election night. So we really don’t know much about the outcome on election night.

The Santa Cruz County clerk has received 2,400 more new ballots since the close of elections on Tuesday. So even though Webber and her staff begin verifying signatures and counting ballots as soon as they are received, it is not until days after the election that she can report what even a majority of the voters have decided.

Although this election will not be formally certified until early April, by the end of Monday, we should have a fairly complete picture of winners and losers in all but the closest of races.

Can anything be done about this?

I suppose we’d want to think a while before implementing the following idea, but it is worth considering. Because fraudulent voting is so low both here in Santa Cruz and across the country, why not just have machines count all of the ballots without verifying the signatures of the voters on each ballot before doing the tabulation? Then we could have a quick result of the voters’ will on election night and then go back later to verify that all of the ballots cast were valid ballots. 

In the very few cases where there was either voter fraud or some other irregularity in a ballot, the final vote could be adjusted.

While there might very rarely be an awkward reversal in an election result, it would be so much better for the public and the candidates, who would know something about the results of an election without waiting a week to find out.