[Marin-d] we may have 2nd victory in the Novato Sanitary board election against privation with provisional ballots still to be counted

[davidquinley at aol.com]

Novato Sanitary board race tightens
Jim Welte
Posted: 11/12/2009 02:19:10 PM PST



The race for the third and final open seat on the Novato Sanitary District board just got closer. 

A count of mail-in and absentee ballots for the Nov. 4 election showed
that challenger Bill Scott made up 60 votes on incumbent Bill Long,
drawing to 37 votes behind him with provisional ballots still to be
counted, said Elaine Ginnold, Marin County registrar of voters.

Long has garnered 4,302 votes, or 15.2 percent, while Scott has tallied
4,265, or 15.1 percent. At the conclusion of election night, Scott
trailed by 100 votes, and he gained only three more after initial
absentee vote counts by the end of last week.

"I initially didn't think there was much chance," said Scott, who was
part of a three-candidate opposition slate along with Dennis Welsh, who
won the election outright with 5,772 votes, or 20.4 percent. "This was
the move that I needed to catch up."

There are still about 1,000 to 1,500 provisional ballots yet to be
counted in Marin, although it is unclear how many of those ballots are
from Novato. Ginnold said she expects to be finished counting those
provisional ballots by the end of the day Friday. Provisional ballots
are issued at the polls to those whose eligibility to vote cannot be
determined by a poll worker. 

"This sounds like Florida," Long said, referring to the marathon
dispute over the results from that state's presidential election in
2000. "But I'm not surprised. There was a lot of campaigning at the end
that brought out perhaps more 


Advertisement



voters than otherwise."

Ginnold's office is in the midst of an experimental project in
conjunction with Philip Stark, a statistics professor at the University
of California at Berkeley, to focus on increasing the level of
confidence in pre-recount elections results. The project involves
manual recounts of some precincts, and Ginnold said she would be
focusing on the Novato Sanitary race "because it's so close."

Long and Scott would be invited to observe such a manual count next
week, Ginnold said. There is no margin that would trigger an automatic
full recount under California election law, but candidates can request
a full recount once the results are certified, Ginnold said.

Scott said he would love to join Welsh on the board in an effort to
bolster their campaign to reverse the board's decision to privatize the
district's wastewater treatment plant. That decision is set to be
placed as a referendum on a ballot in 2010.

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.cagreens.org/pipermail/marin-d_lists.cagreens.org/attachments/20091113/99d4dc70/attachment.html>