MADERA – Tuesday evening the Madera Unified School District will finally swear in a newly elected trustee for Area 5 which has been empty since July of last year. Friday afternoon in a press release issued by the Madera County Elections Department, Madera County Registrar Rebecca Martinez has certified the November 6th election between Lucy Salazar and Steve Duncan that has been held up for nearly three months over “tainted” ballots.
As reported on Big Valley News in November, just prior to Election Day Madera County discovered that a mistake was made by the county’s contracted ballot printer (ProVote Solutions of Porterville), which resulted in just over 400 voters in the Madera area receiving a vote-by-mail ballot that included an additional local contest for which they were not entitled to vote.
After notifying the ballot printer, the Elections Department conducted extensive research while carefully maintaining the integrity of the process, and was able to isolate most of the returned ballots and correct the error. Ultimately, 85 ballots were returned and counted that contained the additional Area 5 contest, and thus there were 85 voters who possibly voted in this contest without being eligible to do so. The difference between the leading candidate Lucy Salazar (945 votes) and the trailing candidate Steve Duncan (875 votes) was only 70 votes.
Based on this uncertainty of the election Martinez obtained an order from the Madera County Superior Court in December extending the deadline to certify this election for six months. This was done in an effort to be transparent about what took place with this election, and to allow the Madera Unified School District the opportunity to call for a new election if it chose to do so. However, only very recently, the Madera Unified School District communicated to the County that they would not be calling for a new election in this matter.
Based on this response from the School District’s attorney Kevin Dale, Martinez was only left with the alternative of certifying the election to the best of her ability under the law. To this end, the Registrar used the proportional vote reduction approach recognized in cases Russell v. McDowell (1890) 83 Cal. 70, and Singletary v. Kelly (1966) 242 Cal.App.3d 611, as well as California Elections Code section 16203. Using this approach, 85 ballots were reduced from the vote totals of each candidate in the same proportion as the percentage of the vote for each candidate.
As Lucy Salazar had 51.92% of the total vote, her vote total was reduced by 44 votes. Steve Duncan’s vote total was then reduced by the remaining 41 votes. As a result, the certification for Trustee Area 5 will be provided to Madera Unified School District today with Lucy Salazar as the winner.
Martinez says it is now the responsibility of the Madera Unified School District Board of Trustees to declare the result and seat the candidate receiving the highest number of votes. The Madera County Registrar believes that in the absence of a new election, this is the fairest approach she could have taken under the law to certify the election results.
The county had hoped the school district would have called for a new election, which would have been paid for by ProVote Solutions who made the mistake with the original ballots, to allow the voters the opportunity to settle this matter but the board of trustees refused. This was the only solution Martinez had in this case with a school district board that was unwilling to work with the county.
If the board accepts the results of the election, Lucy Salazar will be sworn in at Tuesday MUSD Board of Trustees meeting. Steve Duncan has told Big Valley News that he wishes Ms. Salazar the best in her new position. He also said he has no intention of seeking a legal remedy for this unusual certification but that he has lost a faith in the election process.
With a random 85 votes being thrown out by the county because of the Madera Unified Board of Trustees actions, we may never know the real results of this election. Whether these 85 random voters in MUSD Area 5 know it or not, they just learned the definition of the word ‘disenfranchised’, not to mention the notion that sometimes (rarely) your vote doesn’t count.
