Wednesday, June 4, 2014

UPDATED: Kerrigan's Got a Slim, Slim Chance

Posted By on Wed, Jun 4, 2014 at 6:24 PM

click to enlarge Kerrigan talks chances at his campaign party Tuesday night. - GRANT SCOTT-GOFORTH
  • Grant Scott-Goforth
  • Kerrigan talks chances at his campaign party Tuesday night.
UPDATE: The Elections Office is still slogging through the uncounted ballots, and has begun tallying provisional ballots. The number of outstanding ballots from the 4th District is likely to be released early next week.

Following a bit more predictive arithmetic, Chris Kerrigan's chances of collecting enough votes to overcome Virginia Bass for the 4th District supervisor seat remain doubtful.

County Registrar of Voters Carolyn Crnich (operating today on little sleep) said the elections office is working feverishly to gather, collate and count absentee and provisional ballots turned into the polls on Election Day. "We have quite a sorting process to go through and we’re going through that as quickly as possible," she said.

By the end of the day today, her office had collected just over 6,000 uncounted ballots countywide. About 460 of those were dropped off in the 4th District, but vote by mail ballots can be delivered to any precinct on election day. So a Eurekan could have dropped off a ballot in Arcata on her way to work, or vice versa. While Crnich said people typically drop ballots to precincts in their same district, it's just too soon to tell how many votes are outstanding in the 4th District. In addition to the 460 there were 2,850 ballots delivered to the elections office, which are yet to be sorted.

If those 460 votes are all 4th District, and you add to that one-fifth of the 2,850 unsorted election office ballots (presuming that an equal number came from each supervisorial district), there could be around 1,030 uncounted 4th District votes. Bass leads by 303 votes.

That means Kerrigan would have to get nearly 65 percent of the remaining votes, presuming that there are at least 1,030 4th District votes remaining to be counted. That's a lot of if, especially considering that, while provisional ballots typically swing leftie, Kerrigan only got 55 percent of the Election Day votes cast.

Voter turnout was significantly lower than in 2010, when comparing election night final results. With all precincts reporting, only 29 percent of the county's registered voters showed up at the polls.

Here's approximate countywide numbers of the as-yet-to-be-counted votes:

2,850 delivered by mail or hand to the elections office on June 2 or 3.

2,400 vote-by-mail ballots delivered by hand to polling places.

560 provisional ballots.

210 damaged ballots that need to be duplicated.

About 460 ballots were delivered to 4th District precincts, though it's uncertain at this point if they're actually from the 4th District.

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Grant Scott-Goforth

Grant Scott-Goforth

Bio:
Grant Scott-Goforth was an assistant editor and staff writer for The Journal from 2013 to 2017.

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