This past election came with the longest ballot, the most contests, the most ballots cast and the highest number of tight races in Santa Clara County history. So the vote-counters need a little more time process recounts in 10 local races.
The Santa Clara County Registrar of Voters (ROV) still has to recount 982,000 ballots. But it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen by Thursday’s state-set deadline. The redux is part of a new rule that requires an automatic do-over for races in which the margin of victory is less than half a percent.
Elections officials prepared for months for the Nov. 8 election. They hired hundreds of additional employees and worked up to 14-hour days every day of the week. But they still won’t meet the due date for certifying the results.
“It is imperative that the voters and candidates in these close contests have complete faith in the integrity of the results,” Registrar of Voters Shannon Bushey said in a press release earlier this week. “For that reason, we will continue with the automatic recounts past the certification deadline. Transparency has been paramount throughout all of our election processes and will continue until all ballots have been recounted.”
The ROV will certify machine-tabulated votes by deadline, however. Those have already been vetted through routine canvassing, which entails audits of computer tallies and a 100 percent recount of votes cast on touch screen machines. It also includes checking all vote-by-mail signatures, verifying provisional ballots, reconciling polling place rosters and reviewing all ballots cast.
Election staff will continue working extended hours seven days a week until all recounts are completed, Bushey said. The results will be released as soon as they’re verified, though they will not be considered certified results under state law.
Below is a list of the 10 contests being recounted. Click here for the latest results.
- Cupertino Union School District
- Gilroy Unified School District
- Palo Alto Unified School District
- Gilroy City Council
- Los Altos City Council
- Monte Sereno City Council
- San Jose District 8 City Council
- Los Altos Hills City Council
- Santa Clara Chief of Police
- Measure Y, San Jose Unified School District
We stopped for a quick #MannequinChallenge during our afternoon break today! #RecountLife #AutomaticRecounts #Election2016 pic.twitter.com/7qCynC7LXx
— Registrar of Voters (@sccvote) December 4, 2016
Maybe we can come up with another 982,000 votes for Hillary if we keep counting.
Hillary Clinton, 73.37%.
I would suggest that Santa Clara County and local governments start counting up how much federal gravy they will NOT be receiving over the next EIGHT years.
I think that Apple Computer is eventually going to realize that all of the fundraiser’s for Hillary at Tim Cook’s house are going to end up costing Apple whatever sugar plums Apple was expecting to gain.