With about 30,000 ballots still to process, there are still weeks of work in store for Stanislaus County Registrar of Voters Donna Linder and her team.
“We go through a lot of steps to make sure each vote is properly counted,” said Linder.
That’s an understatement.
Mail-in ballots are weighed, sorted, and scanned before the opening of envelopes even commences. After that, they’re flattened, examined, counted and stored safely. It’s a rigorous, multi-step process that ensures each vote is counted — the way the voter intended for it to be — and without duplication. There are even random, one-percent manual tallies, where ballots from every vote center throughout the county are hand-counted — by a team of four counters — to make sure the hand tally matches the computer count.
“If there’s a problem,’ we’ll contact the voter to make sure that vote gets counted,” added Linder.
This month is just the warm-up for Linder and the election team. The main event is the Nov. 5 general election.
Though that election is eight months away, 13th congressional district incumbent Rep. John Duarte (R-Hughson) is pleased with the snapshot provided by Tuesday’s primary.
Two years ago, Duarte won by just 564 votes over then-Assemblymember Adam Gray (D-Merced) in what was the second-closest House race in the nation. At this point, Duarte has a lead of nearly 4,600 votes.
Though tens of thousands of votes remain to be counted in the five counties — Stanislaus, Merced, San Joaquin, Madera, and Fresno — that constitute the 13th district, and though turnout is historically low for primary elections, Duarte is riding high.
“These results prove that my record of working with both parties to make gas and groceries affordable, bring good-paying jobs to the Valley, and fix our broken immigration system resonates with working families,” Duarte said in a press release. “They show that this November, voters will once again reject Adam Gray’s track record of extreme partisan politics.”
Neither Duarte nor Gray — the only two entrants in the race for the 13th district — campaigned particularly hard in the weeks leading up to the election given the fact the top two vote recipients would advance to the general election Nov. 5. But now the campaign will begin in earnest for a race that the Cook Political Report with Amy Walter has categorized as a toss-up for months.
"The short answer is no, we're not alarmed at all,” said Gray, when asked if the early returns cause him concern. “It was a primary election to decide which two people should face each other in the general election eight months from now. That's literally the only thing to take away from the primary. Voters know this do-nothing Congress has been a complete failure; in November they’ll fix that by sending someone to Washington willing to do the hard work needed to bring results to the Valley.”
In the 5th congressional district, incumbent Rep. Tom McClintock (R-El Dorado Hills) and Mike Barkley (D-Manteca) are virtual locks to advance to November. The Cook Political Report classifies the 5th as a solidly Republican district.
Thus far, McClintock has pulled nearly 94,000 votes to Barkley’s 53,666. Independent candidate Steve Wozniak is a distant third with 14,212 votes.
In the race for the Assembly’s 22nd district, incumbent Juan Alanis (R-Modesto) has a lead of nearly 5,000 votes over Democrat Jessica Self of Modesto — 22,285 to 17,339.
In the race for the county’s Democratic Central Committee (District 2), with four seats available, Margaret Souza, Victor Azevedo Costa, Michelle Tennell and Lise Talbott are currently the top vote recipients, comfortably ahead of Catherine Doo and Keristofer Seryani.
Five seats are available for the GOP Central Committee (District 2), with Ryan Taylor, Patrick Shields, Kelly Thompson, Thomas Pannier and Christan Santos ahead of Wendy Bosshardt.
Vito Chiesa, who represents Turlock as Stanislaus County’s District 2 Supervisor, ran unopposed.
The closest race on the ballot is for Proposition 1, which would authorize $6.38 billion in bonds to build treatment facilities for those with mental-health and substance-use challenges, and would provide housing for the homeless. As it stands, with more than 4.5 million votes counted, the yes votes are leading by about 13,000 votes.
In other statewide races, Rep. Adam Schiff, a Democrat, and former baseball star Steve Garvey, a Republican, are poised to advance to the general election for a chance to fill the late Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s U.S. Senate seat.
And, to nobody’s surprise, President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump are headed for another showdown this fall.
