Riverside County, California elections officials counted the disputed 12,563 late mail ballots on Friday night, and apparently those votes have already changed at least one outcome from the June 8, 2010 primary. Before those votes had been counted, Juan Vargas was leading Mary Salas for the Democratic nomination, 40th State Senate district, by only 12 votes. But according to this story, Salas now leads Vargas, although the story does not tell the new vote totals. UPDATE: the earlier story was incorrect. Vargas defeated Salas by 22 votes. See this corrected story.
Ballot Access News
Edited By Richard Winger
Makes sense that the newspapers, with the exception of Rostra, have declared Salas the incorrect victor of the election in subsequent months. It seems that the papers and the Riverside Registrar of Voters make a good match in the greater Southern Cal area.
The article is confusing because it is reporting the Riverside County vote. It also has been corrected.
Before the added votes were counted, Salas led Vargas 3924:3818 in Riverside County. It is now 4057:3962. So the additional votes actually favored Vargas by a 133:144 margin.
So originally, Salas had 50.7% of the vote in Riverside County, and now she has 50.6%. So the article is correct that Salas has just over 50% of the vote in Riverside Count. It is just that she now has even less just over 50% than on election night.
While the article said that potentially 890 of the 12,000 missing votes were from the 40th district (presumably based on number of mailed-out ballots). It turns out that only 277 votes were missing, which amounts to 3.5% of the total vote in the Riverside part of the district (0.6% of the total district).
A curiosity is that Vargas won only in Imperial County, but by enough to “swamp” the result in San Diego and Riverside counties.
About 2/3 of the vote is from San Diego County, with the remaining split about evenly between the Imperial and Riverside counties. All of Imperial County is included in the district. The San Diego County portion is in the extreme SW corner, including Chula Vista, the San Ysidro portion of San Diego, National City, Imperial Beach and Coronado linked to Imperial County by a strip across the desert along the border. The Riverside County portion is in the Coachella Valley southeast of Palm Springs.
Salas received 51.2% of the vote in San Diego, and 50.6% in Riverside. But Vargas 55.8% margin in Imperial was enough even though it was only 1/6 of the total vote, and really wasn’t a superlative margin.
The Democratic primary likely decided the election. In 2006, the Democrat (not running for reelection) had 64% of the vote. Though under a Top 2 Open primary, the Vargas-Salas race would have been for 2nd place to face a Republican.
The post office mixup is ever curiouser. Riverside County officials went to their local post office in Riverside (city) on election day, and just before poll closing went to a Redlands distribution center (as they had for the past 12 years). Redlands is actually just over the county line in San Bernardino County.
The USPS “assumed” that the election officials would pick up the ballots in Moreno Valley, and when they failed to show up on election night, they sent them over to the Riverside post office on Wednesday.
#2. Assume only chaos when it comes to ANY change in bureaucratic stuff — especially in elections.
See Bush v. Gore 2000 — NO definition of a legal vote with the various election systems in Florida — especially the infamous now DEAD punch-card system — once upon a time the latest high tech stuff — existing for about 30 years — now in trash dumps and museums.
As noted, Rostra had it right from the get go…
http://sdrostra.com/?p=6379