Election Notes

Initial returns in the First District Supervisors race (Redwood/Potter Valley), posted a little after 8pm last Tuesday night showed Madeline Cline with a large lead over her opponents with almost 60% of the 1405 votes cast. Adam Gaska, Trevor Mockel, and Carrie Shattuck trail with about 23%, 9% and 8%, respectively (rounded to the nearest whole number percentage. If Ms. Cline’s more than 50% percentage is sustained after the rest of the votes are counted, there will be no run-off and she will assume the seat vacated by Glenn McGourty in January 2025. (For reference, in March of 2020 McGourty got 48% of the 4729 votes cast with Jon Kennedy, James Green and John Sakowicz trailing with 30%, 16% and 6% respectively. So there probably are around 3,300 votes yet to be counted.)

In the Second District (City of Ukiah) Incumbent Maureen Mulheren has a narrow 51% to 49% lead over challenger Jacob Brown with 1,056 votes cast. There will be no run-off in this two-person race. (For reference, in March of 2020 Mulheren got 42% of 4512 votes cast, with Mari Rodin and Joel Soinila trailing with 36% and 22% respectively. So there are probably around 3,400 votes yet to be counted.)

In the Fourth District Fort Bragg Mayor Bernie Norvell has a sizable 82% to 18% lead over Georgina Avila-Gorman with 1883 votes cast so far.

The Abandoned Vehicle abatement $1 license fee add-on measure is ahead by 80% to 20% with 6,922 votes cast countywide.

Election Numbers and Percentages, posted at 12:22am last Wednesday Morning:

7418 votes counted. 

3,754 for Biden

1,265 for Trump

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797 for Barbara Lee (11%)

946 for Katie Porter ((14%)

2,833 for Adam Schiff (42%)

1,418 for Steve Garvey (31%)

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First District Supervisor:

Mockel: 142, 10%

Shattuck: 121, 8%

Cline: 871, 59%

Gaska: 355, 23%

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Second District Supervisor:

Mulheren: 541, 51%

Brown: 518, 49%

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Fourth District: 

Norvell: 1,559, 81%

Avila-Gorman: 361, 19%

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Proposition 1 (Newsom’s Mental Health proposal)

Yes: 4,127, 57%

No: 3,085, 43%

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One doesn’t have to look very far to get an sense of a large segment of the Mendo electorate’s backward political leanings than the 42% vote that the loathsome Adam Schiff got in Mendocino County in the initial vote summary posted Tuesday night. Here you had a good liberal candidate, Barbara Lee, a veritable icon of progressives, a smart black woman, gravitas and all, the lone vote in Congress against Bush’s bogus war on Iraq, and all she got from Mendo’s “progressive” Democrats was a pathetic 11 percent. Mendo’s votes didn’t matter much in the statewide election, so voters were free to vote for the card-carrying progressive if they wanted to. But no: A very large chunk of Mendo did as Big Dem dictated and went for Schiff. Mark Mark’s Words: Schiff will make Diane Feinstein look good.

Speaking of doing what they’re told, Madeline Cline. The young Ms. Cline with no political experience besides being a paid wine lobbyist for a couple of years, and nothing in Mendocino County besides a residence at a vineyard, got almost 60% of the initial District 1 vote count. There’s a chance that the percentages could shift enough by the time the thousands of uncounted votes are toted up to force a runoff between Cline and Adam Gaska who got about 23% of the District 1 vote. But even if Gaska got all the Shattuck and Mockel votes (which he won’t) he’d still need some Cline voters to switch, which is unlikely. Gaska was a much more serious, experienced and Mendocino-rooted local candidate. But given the demographics and the entrenched wine interests in the First District, it seems unlikely that Gaska could get into a runoff, much less win in November. Cline’s higher than expected percentage shows again how tight a grip the wine mob has on voters in the First District. The wine mob sees Cline as a reliable autovote for anything the wine mob wants, so they funded her campaign handsomely to get her elected. Whereas Gaska, while an actual grape grower himself as opposed to Cline who hasn’t grown anything, was seen as too thoughtful and independent and therefore not a reliable autovote for Wine. 

On the other hand, when the wine mob isn’t plopping their heavy thumb on the scales of local elections, things can get interesting and contested. Such as with the narrow 51-49% lead Maureen Mulheren has in early returns over her opponent, Jacob Brown, a former Marine and Ukiah business manager. Clearly, Ms. Mulheren isn’t going over as well as she thinks she is in Ukiah. Jacob Brown actually got more votes than Mulheren’s soul sister Mari Rodin got four years ago. But the final outcome in that race will have to wait for a few weeks while the Elections office takes their sweet time counting the votes.

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Ever since Mendo went to mail-in ballots in the early 2000s, the final vote count has taken the entire 30 days allowed by law. Not that many years ago when people mostly voted in person at their local polling place, the outcome was known much earlier, typically late on election night, unless there was a very close election like the one in the 90s between Liz Henry and Heather Drum in Fort Bragg which Henry eventually won by one vote after at least two recounts. 

Mendo of late has become accustomed to the month-long delay. As recently as November of 2016 the vote was so slow coming in that it became an issue for the Supervisors, some of whom openly complained; the Board at that time even offered some additional temporary staffing increases to the Elections office to speed things up. Then-Election Officer Susan Ranochak declined the offer. 

Here’s an excerpt of our coverage from back in November of 2016:

“As of 4pm Thursday, two days after the election, not a single Mendo vote had been counted since election night. More than 31,000 mail-in ballots have been received, but County Clerk Susan Ranochak has only sent approximately 6,000 of them through the machines without releasing updated vote totals. Her office is covered in bins of ballots that haven't been opened yet. The 22,000 ballots received by Saturday should have been opened and counted by election night.

“One source out on Low Gap Road put it this way: “Ranochak needs 30 people working on mail-ins in the days before the election, not the eight she has. She needs more voting machines and more people there, too. I saw Supervisor Gjerde down there Monday and he said she has never asked for extra help. Better yet, re-open the polling stations. By law, every vote cast at a polling place has to be counted election night. End of problem.”

“A visitor to the Assessor’s office said that pending assessment work was being delayed because clerical workers from the Assessor’s Office (who also work for Ranochak) had been loaned to the Elections office. But our source for that suspected it wasn’t true because there didn’t seem to any improvement in the vote counting process.

“Malcolm Macdonald Comments: ‘In 2014 the total number of votes cast in the (final count) Fort Bragg City Council race was 4,729. The 2016 total (so far) is only 1,752. The 2014 race was for three council seats, 2016 is for two, so multiplying the 2014 total by 2/3 still means a final total of about 3,153. The 2014 FB Council race was a fairly high charged affair, but 2016 is a Presidential election year; therefore, one would expect roughly an equal or greater number of voters. Similarly there were 15,930 votes for three Mendocino Coast Healthcare seats in 2014. Though there are two four-year seats and one two-year seat up for election in 2016, that's still three seats. The total vote count should be somewhat similar, but there are only 7,225 votes accounted for at this point. Assessor-Recorder Ranochak's website has no updates beyond the two a.m. election night total AND no mention of estimated totals of votes still to be counted! There is a nonsensical column stating the number of precincts reporting, which states that in the Mendo Healthcare District fifty-nine out of fifty-nine precincts have reported. This falsely leads voters/citizens to believe that all the precincts, and all the votes, have been counted. If we hadn't had the nearly identical experience in 2014 to go by, citizens might be bamboozled into thinking this is the truly final vote count, when in reality it is nowhere near the final total. The simple question: What the heck is going on? That's the polite version. My advice to Ranochak: Finish this count, then offer your letter of resignation immediately thereafter. Advice to the Board of Supervisors: Find a way to deduct this recurring fiasco from Ranochak's pay and/or pension, then figure out a method for fixing this vote count fiasco before 2018.’

“1,271 Ballots Left To Count In The Willits City Council Election: with only 627 votes counted in the “Final Election Night Report,” at least 66.96 percent of the vote has not yet been counted! A higher percent than ever before. Plus an unknown number of provisional ballots (there are 1,160 provisional ballots countywide to “review and process.” This according to a Saturday press release from Mendocino County Elections Office. “Our office is not open today (we are not answering phones), although we are here processing ballots and proceeding with our canvas procedures.”

“The only election I can recall (and voter registrar Sue Ranochak can recall) that flipped actual results with the final, certified count was the 2014 Fort Bragg City Council election, where the Advocate-News reported Mayor Dave Turner was in fourth place, losing with “18 percent” (rounded figure), but with final results, Turner came in third, winning the third seat with 18.98% of the vote.

“To repeat: Why are so many ballots uncounted in the “Final Election Night Report”? Because floods of Mendocino County voters are dropping their ballots off at the polls on Election Day, and local voters are doing that because many of them were forced into “mail-in-only” precincts by the former registrar of voters when she, Marsha Wharff, closed most of the walk-in polling places in Mendocino County.

“Supervisor John McCowen, asked to comment on the glacial pace of Mendocino County election returns, had this to say: ‘Count me among those who believe the problem can best be addressed by increasing the number of traditional polling place voters and hiring extra help to process mail in ballots that arrive before election day. It is simply not in the public interest to count less than a third of the votes on election day and wait weeks for the final returns. Any issues involving cost, staffing, logistics, and security can be addressed if there is a willingness to do so. Any voter can vote by mail if they choose, but the thousands of voters who prefer voting at a neighborhood polling place on election day should have the option to do so’.”

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Back to 2024…

Jon Kennedy, Potter Valley, former Shasta County Supervisors and former candidate for First District Supervisor in 2020, posted the following note on Facebook before Election Day 2024:

“Mendocino County may have the worst elections department in the state. I predict a complete clusterf$#^ this election. Most likely a low voter turnout because of the multiple errors made this election cycle, so my predictions may not even sniff reality. Ok, easy one first. Supervisor Mulheren will win with somewhere in the 60% area. Could be higher. District 1 Supervisor: There's a very good chance one candidate will win tonight, even though there are four. There's no entrenched bureaucrat being propped up by the local Dem party, and Covid didn't get in the way of campaigning, so if anyone wins tonight, based on the gobs of money spent and the impressive campaign, it'll be Cline. If there's a runoff, it will most likely be between Cline and Gaska.”

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It will be interesting to see if the runners-up in the First District Race — Gaska, Carrie Shattuck and Trevor Mockel — stay involved in County politics and to what extent. We certainly hope they do, including Mockel.

Please Note: A national IQ test will be held on November 5th, 2024.

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Mike Jamison:

The Secretary of State page re returned ballots has updated info covering March 6 now.

16,725 ballots have been accepted by now (16,845 actually received) with 7,418 of that already counted.

So, so far 9,307 remain to be counted, countywide.

Maybe a couple thou per district.

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Jennifer Poole (at the Willits Weekly):

California Secretary of State says only a third of Mendo ballots reported.

Here's a tidbit, a CA Secretary of State report posted March 8 says only one-third of Mendo ballots have been reported. The “Estimated Unprocessed Ballots” report for Mendocino County shows the same 7,418 ballots already reported in that 2024 “Final Election Night Report,” plus an estimated 15,258 ballots still to process. Not confirmed by local office at present. 

Usually we get about half in that “Final Election Night Report” and about half “still to count.” 

If the numbers hold — 7,418, plus 15,258 still to count, plus maybe 500 provisional ballots — that'll be around 23,176 voters. 

In 2020, the final primary turnout was 29,527 votes. Lots of votes in the local Democrat primary that year, including 8,591 for Bernie Sanders, who won the local primary.

So turnout will be down for 2024, but not as far down as some think.