On an evening when the school board races were all but decided during absentee voting and the ballot measures decided shortly thereafter, the story of the day was the extremely low turnout. While the final figures are perhaps a few days away from being made official, it appears certain that turnout did not top 30 percent.
This was not a tremendous surprise given the relatively low interest that the school board election seemed to draw on this blog and throughout the community.
In the end, the results were pretty much as expected. Susan Lovenburg finished first, Richard Harris finished a comfortable, but relatively close second to Lovenburg. There was a considerable gap to the third place finish of Bob Schelen who was narrowly above Joe Spector.
In the low turnout, the establishment and relatively better known candidates won.
At first the ballot measures looked to be in doubt with Measure P drawing a very narrow margin above the two-thirds needed and Measure Q falling four votes shy of the two-thirds needed. But as the precincts themselves came in, both Measure P and Measure Q passed by comfortable margins with P garnering over 73% and Q just under 73%.
Both Measures won just under 80% of the vote that was cast on election day. So while the absentees mirrored the results of the school board election, there was a sizable gap between the results of the ballot measures. The folks at the election office felt that was somewhat typical, with the gap closing in recent years between absentee and non-absentee voters, nevertheless, absentee voters still tend to be more conservative and less supportive of tax measures.
The Vanguard will have some interviews and postmortems with the winning school board candidates. We are quite pleased that both parcel tax measures passed, the money was badly needed by both the library and the schools. Stay tuned for much more coverage.
----Doug Paul Davis reporting
This was not a tremendous surprise given the relatively low interest that the school board election seemed to draw on this blog and throughout the community.
In the end, the results were pretty much as expected. Susan Lovenburg finished first, Richard Harris finished a comfortable, but relatively close second to Lovenburg. There was a considerable gap to the third place finish of Bob Schelen who was narrowly above Joe Spector.
In the low turnout, the establishment and relatively better known candidates won.
At first the ballot measures looked to be in doubt with Measure P drawing a very narrow margin above the two-thirds needed and Measure Q falling four votes shy of the two-thirds needed. But as the precincts themselves came in, both Measure P and Measure Q passed by comfortable margins with P garnering over 73% and Q just under 73%.
Both Measures won just under 80% of the vote that was cast on election day. So while the absentees mirrored the results of the school board election, there was a sizable gap between the results of the ballot measures. The folks at the election office felt that was somewhat typical, with the gap closing in recent years between absentee and non-absentee voters, nevertheless, absentee voters still tend to be more conservative and less supportive of tax measures.
The Vanguard will have some interviews and postmortems with the winning school board candidates. We are quite pleased that both parcel tax measures passed, the money was badly needed by both the library and the schools. Stay tuned for much more coverage.
----Doug Paul Davis reporting
