Electoral limbo is exactly where Santa Cruz County officials and candidates expected to be

On Wednesday, Santa Cruz County Clerk Tricia Webber saw something she’d never seen: The postman dropped off six trays’ worth of fresh mail-in ballots to be verified and tallied. This was an unusually high number for the day after election day; typically, ballots don’t begin arriving at such a clip until later in the week. 

For Webber, this only further emphasized the difficulty, especially at this early stage, in committing to a timeline, or a plan, or an estimate of when her team will finish counting votes, despite the anxious clamoring from campaigns and the community for more certainty.  The results will remain static until Friday at 4 p.m., when the clerk has committed to adding 10,000 to 15,000 more votes to the countywide tally. The number of ballots remaining will depend on how many the office receives by next Tuesday. 

“I’d like to have a definitive timeline, but the reality is that I have no idea how many ballots are going to come in and be considered timely,” Webber said. “There is no way for me to really give a good answer because there are a lot of different moving parts.” 

As of election night, 46,679 ballots had been cast among the county’s 169,243 registered voters, a turnout of 26.7%. Webber said Tuesday night she still needed to count 22,500 mail-in ballots, 700 same-day registration ballots, 450 damaged ballots and 50 provisionals, plus whatever mail carriers drop off over the next week. Adding all of those ballots to the total would push turnout up to around 41%, significantly higher than early predictions of about 30%. 

Why wait until Friday? Webber said it’s a matter of her own philosophy. 

“People don’t want small updates, people want chunky updates,” Webber said. “I would only be able to add a couple thousand votes to the tally if I did an update on Wednesday. Waiting until Friday gives us two full days to work on counting.” 

Another 15,000 votes will certainly be enlightening for the lone countywide race: Measure K, the proposed sales tax increase. However, for the local races, which span the panorama of Santa Cruz County, there is no sense of how many ballots are left to be counted in each district. The weight of those 15,000 votes on each race will be difficult to decipher without a clearer sense of the geography of those ballots. 

“Just knowing the countywide number of ballots is not helpful for me in my race,” said Capitola Mayor Kristen Brown, who as of Tuesday night led the race for District 2 county supervisor with 32.5% of the vote share. “I can’t really do the math because I don’t know how many of those ballots are for the District 2 race.” 

Brown said the uncertainty is challenging, but that she still “feels good about where we’re at,” which is trending toward a head-to-head November runoff with second-place opponent Kim De Serpa.

Andrew Goldenkranz, head of the county’s Democratic Central Committee, said 15,000 votes will be “a pretty healthy chunk.” The District 1 supervisor race in which incumbent Manu Koenig leads Lani Faulkner by 9.5 points and more than 1,000 votes, could be “ready to functionally call” by Friday. Same with the likelihood of runoff elections in supervisor Districts 2 and 5, and the fate of the city of Santa Cruz’s growth control initiative, Measure M. 

“Without knowing anything for sure, it’s hard to say anything with confidence,” Goldenkranz said. “A best practice would be that we have a commitment from the clerk’s office to have a certain amount of votes counted on Friday, and then a clear timetable of how many votes are to be counted by certain dates so that there is some definitive roadmap.” 

Without a clearer picture from the clerk’s office, former county supervisor and local politico Ryan Coonerty said trying to determine results this early requires “a lot of half-baked and wishful analysis.” However, with the exception of one race, he said he doesn’t foresee later tallies changing many fates. 

“It would take a big statistical change to swing these results, and I don’t think many candidates or measures have different election day voters than early voters,” Coonerty said.

The one race where election day voters might significantly differ from early voters is the Santa Cruz City Council District 5, where Susie O’Hara leads Joe Thompson by more than 33 percentage points but only 267 votes. District 5 envelopes the UC Santa Cruz campus. Campaigns in the past have mobilized on-campus students to register and vote in local elections on election day. Same-day registration ballots are not counted until later and do not show up in the election day tallies released by the clerk. 

If Thompson, a third-year student at UCSC, successfully rallied fellow students to back the campaign on election day, we could see that 33-point gap flip as the student vote is counted. Bodie Shargel, Thompson’s campaign manager, told Lookout they are banking on such a strategy to win. 

Before his time as supervisor, Koenig operated in the world of political polling, surveys and research through his tech startup Civinomics. 

In the survey world, a 400-600 person sample size can produce a statistically accurate poll for the entire county, which has a population of nearly 270,000. County District 1 has 37,063 registered voters; Koenig said he believes the 11,331 ballots already cast is a “very representative sample size.” 

“I don’t think the difference between election day voters and early voters is going to be that dramatically different,” Koenig said. “Especially in a primary election like this,” where turnout was predicted to hover around 30%.

Chatting by phone from his car Wednesday, Koenig said he was confident in his lead, “statistically speaking,” but would “probably wait until Friday to call it.” 

In supervisor District 5, where Monica Martinez opened up early voting totals with 45.83% of the popular vote, Friday and the next tallies will reveal whether Martinez received more than 50% of the popular vote, or if she will have to face the second-highest vote-getter — currently a battle between Christopher Bradford (21.03%) and Tom Decker (19.78%) — in November. 

Martinez said she was heartened by the strong early support, but she doesn’t hold “any big expectations” for the outcome yet. 

“We were all prepped to not have a clear answer on Tuesday night. That makes it hard, with so much anticipation on election day,” Martinez said. “I’m not too surprised that we’re in this ambiguous moment right now.” 

Webber said that after Friday, her team will tally more votes over the weekend for another drop on Monday. She expects that after Monday, almost all the ballots will have been counted, though precisely how many more remain won’t be known until after next Tuesday’s deadline.

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