Coad Garners More Votes Than Lopez for Supervisor

With the help of late-arriving absentee ballots, Cynthia Coad slipped past opponent Lou Lopez in their race for an open Orange County Board of Supervisors seat, according to a tally released Thursday by the county registrar of voters.

The change in order does not change the fact that the two still will be in a runoff in November. Neither received more than 50% of the vote.

The registrar added to the total vote 49,205 absentee ballots received in the last few days of the primary and an additional 2,904 votes cast at precincts. Still to be tallied are about 5,000 votes cast on provisional, write-in or damaged ballots.

One race on the Republican Central Committee was affected by the latest tally: Incumbent E.F. Sanford edged past Bob Cielnicky for the last seat representing the 67th Assembly District on the committee.

In the supervisor race, Coad had 20,621 total votes, and Lopez had 19,735. Lopez had led by 273 on election day.

Lopez, an Anaheim police officer and councilman, predicted victory this fall, saying that he has the experience. “Voters will turn to me when we talk about the No. 1 issue of crime and our experience,” he said.

Coad said her message about “safe streets, quality education and more accountability in county government was well received.” The campaign called her “the front-runner” in the fall runoff.

Nearly 42% of the county’s 1,178,699 registered voters cast ballots. That is slightly lower than the 43% who voted in the presidential primary in 1996 but substantially higher than the 34% who turned out for the last off-year primary, in 1994.

The total number of absentee ballots, most of which were included in election night tallies, was 128,285, or 26% of all votes.

Assistant Registrar Don Taylor said the 5,000 remaining ballots consist of provisional ballots, a few cards with write-in candidates and ballots that were damaged and had to be duplicated to be readable by machine.

In the state attorney general race, the additional ballots did not bring Dist. Atty. Mike Capizzi any closer to his rival, Assistant Atty. Gen. Dave Stirling. Capizzi still lost his home county to Stirling by more than 8,000 votes.