Handful of Races Hinging on Absentee Ballot Count

With several close races hanging in the balance, county election officials said Thursday that about 38,600 late-arriving absentee ballots will not be counted until Monday afternoon.

Extremely tight races remain for the Santa Paula and Moorpark city councils, the Thousand Oaks school board and the Ventura County Community College District board.

And still statistically possible, although highly unlikely, is a change in the outcome of the 3rd District supervisorial race in which Supervisor Kathy Long holds a 1,657-vote lead over Camarillo Councilman Mike Morgan.

If Morgan were to get the same percentage of absentee ballots as he did in the first batch of absentees, he would close that margin by 450 votes but still fall short of victory.

“But it’s not over until it’s over,” said county elections chief Bruce Bradley. “Unlike Florida, we don’t say who has won until it’s really over. So we’ll just wait until we do the update on Monday.”

The closest undecided race in the county is for two seats on the Santa Paula City Council. Electrician John Procter, who backed the city’s successful SOAR anti-sprawl initiative, leads by 168 votes with 2,804. But just 41 votes separate Ray C. Luna and Alfonso A. Guilin for the second seat. About 1,350 absentee ballots have not been counted.

In Moorpark, business owner Roseann Mikos, a key supporter of the city’s SOAR initiative, holds a narrow lead over Keith Millhouse, a county planning commissioner, for two seats on the council. In third place, and just 369 votes behind Millhouse, is Councilman Chris Evans. About 1,300 absentee votes have not been counted.

In Thousand Oaks, school board trustees Dorothy Beaubien and Dolores Didio are in a fight for two seats with teacher and attorney Laura Lee Custodio. Didio, who has 14,814 votes, leads Beaubien by 641, while Custodio is in third, 21 votes behind Beaubien.

More than 7,000 absentee votes in the Conejo Valley Unified School District have not been counted.

Incumbent trustee Robert Gonzales, police chief in Santa Paula, leads educator Ruth Hemming of Ojai by 835 votes, 19,906 to 19,071, for a community college board seat. About 9,000 absentee ballots are left to be counted.

Monday’s absentee count will start in the morning if all 38,600 ballots have been taken out of envelopes and processed by then. If not, the count will begin about noon and run for three hours, Bradley said.

Even then, a winner might not be known in extremely close races, because about 2,750 damaged or questionable ballots will not be tallied until the end of next week.

“It will take all of next week easily to clear the provisionals,” Bradley said. “That takes an inordinate amount of research.”

Bradley said he does not expect to announce final vote totals until Nov. 28.