Close 2018 Races: Vote Count after Monday 11/19 Report

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preview from just-released count — Ashleigh Aitken’s deficit down from 1406 to 890!

Notable results and non-results:

• Hardly any votes counted in Anaheim, so don’t get freaked out by Harry Sidhu’s continuing lead over Ashleigh Aitken.
• Ousted incumbents include Chris Thompson from Fullerton Joint Union High School Board, Tim Surridge from Orange Unified School Board, Dennis P. Walsh from Saddleback Valley, Rob Zur Schmiede in Laguna Beach, Frank Cobo in the Midway City Sanitary District — and Billy O’Connell in Huntington Beach is looking a little Edison High School green around the gills.

“Close shave” image of a English World Cup fanatic fan “borrowed” from https://www.itv.com/news/meridian/update/2014-06-16/england-fan-has-close-shave-with-steven-gerrard/ on the fair use grounds of that it is completely hilarious. (We’ll take it down if they ask.)

Here are the downballot races that are still close.  I have included the the static numbers from Monday’s OC ROV report and the Secretary of State’s office (for multi-county races) and the trend from the previous reports on Saturday.  In each race, the name in orange is currently barely in and the one in magenta is currently barely out.  (I’m somewhat arbitrarily and selectively drawing the line right around “under 5%,” down 1% from yesterday’s criterion.)

If you know anything interesting about these races and why we should care about them, please speak up!

Following the race updates will be the update of the “What’s Left to Count” report from the OCROV and a list of useful links.

James Kelley adds 33 votes, Christine de Bretteville adds 29.  Lead expands from 91 to 95.

Diana Hill adds 258 votes; Jeffrey Barke adds 261.  Lead shrinks from 26 votes to 23.

Metoyer adds 15 votes; Murphy adds 14.  Lead expands from 404 to 405.  We will discontinue daily coverage of this race.

Kris Erickson adds 321 votes; Tim Surridge adds 262.  Lead expands from 3,185 to 3,244.  We will discontinue daily coverage of this race.

Greg Kunath adds 122 votes.  Dan Walsh adds 131 votes.  Dennis P. Walsh adds 131 votes.   We will discontinue daily coverage of Dennis P. Walsh’s progress in this race.

Lauren Klatzker adds 332 votes.  Chris Thompson adds 236 votes.  Lead expands from 544 to 640.  We will discontinue daily coverage of this race.

Regina Cuadra adds 201 votes.  Chester Jeng adds 173 votes.  Lead expands from 60 to 88 votes.

Juan Gabriel Alvarez adds 13 votes.  Jeff Cole adds 3 votes.  Lead expands from 68 to 78 votes.

Rhodia Shead adds 46 votes;  Joe Pak adds 33 votes; lead expands from 80 to 93 votes and out of the 6% range.  We will discontinue daily coverage of this race.

Janice Caitlin Meyer adds 213 votes; Shana Charles adds 215 votes.  Lead shrinks from 410 to 408.  We will discontinue daily coverage of this race.

Shari Kowalke adds 114 votes; Jennifer Hayden adds 122 votes.  Lead for third seat shrinks from 372 to 358.

John Briscoe added 425 votes.  Jack Souders added 502 votes.  Gracey Van Der Mark added 507 votes.  Lead in the race for the third seat falls from 638 votes to 633.

Doug Chaffee adds 2,837 votes; Tim Shaw adds 2,531,  The lead expands from 266 to 572 votes.  Doesn’t look like a good day for Shaw, but without knowing where the votes came from it’s hard to draw any conclusions.  (That information could be obtained by comparing the SOV forms for different cities and districts on the two days, but I’m not going to do it.  If anyone wants to volunteer, go ahead!)

Harry Sidhu added 302 votes; Ashleigh Aitken added 460.  The lead shrinks by 158 votes.  HOWEVER, there is good reason to suspect that a sizable number of provisional ballots are being challenged in Anaheim, whose percentage of the overall vote has been shrinking each day over the last week just when one would think it would be growing as the ROV moves to counting provisional votes, and therefore are not reflected in these figures.  (This will be the topic of a longer separate story, as soon as I can get to it.  Let’s just say for now that if it turns out that Disney lawyers are trying to obstruct or even just delay counting of the Latino vote in their flagship city, every network except maybe Disney’s own ABC and Fox will be interested in it.)

Vargas is up by 219, Parker by 188, Shatynski by 145, Hall by 179.

Sunny Park is up by 98, Virginia Vaughn is up by 87, and Val Sadowinski (whom it’s easier to take in than leave out) is up by 79.  Park’s lead rises from the previous day’s 3 votes (!) to 14.

Beth Swift is up by 57, Ian MacDonald is up by 45.  This one is close to being called, but not today.

Only the third seat is (barely) in doubt.  Morales and Marquez each added 17 votes.

Vo added 362, Harper added 284, Constantine added 352, Grandis added 225, Nguyen added 282, Osborn added 214, Tucker added 240.  Even using a 5% margin for today, everyone except Lecong is technically still in the game — and no, I really don’t expect any of the top three candidates to slip.

I’m leaving Mark Paredes’s race up for now even though it’s outside both yesterday’s 6% and today’s 5% boundaries because I like him and he deserves more time in the spotlight — neither of which are true of Phat Bui.  Bui gained 107 votes compared to 121 for Paredes and 57 for Dovinh.  So am I saying there’s a chance?  Sure, let’s say so.  He just needs to pick up the pace in provisionals! (Lots of provisionals….)

Erik Peterson (and to a lesser extent Kim Carr and Barbara Delgleize are on the right side of the bubble right now, but this race will be a close shave either way.  I’ll give totals for everyone down to Kalmick, even though I think he has too many people to pass.   Posey, the only one who is entirely safe, gained 660 votes.  Delgeize gained 549.  Carr gained 614 — and there you see a Democratic-endorsed candidate doing better in the late running.  Peterson gained 490.  Sterud gained 386.  O’Connell gained 365.  Lathus gained 425.  OK, nobody’s catching up to Peterson?  Fine, then:  We will discontinue daily coverage of this race.

The only real question here is whether Carrie O’Malley, Lauren Johnson-Norris and/or Kevin Abazajian can catch up to Anthony Kuo.  (Kuo and O’Malley were the endorsed Republicans; Khan and Johnson-Norris were the endorsed Democrats, with Abazajian not getting support because of what by now should be pretty obvious concerns about not splitting the vote.  Khan picked up 175 votes yesterday; Kuo picked up 113 (note the Dem vs. Reep tendencies there); O’Malley picked up 86; Johnson-Norris picked up 123; Abazajian picked up 148.  While Khan will continue to pull away and the trailing Democrats will continue their slight gains, I don’t see the rank order changing at all.  Probably another day of monitoring will be all we need.

Ann Christoph and Cheryl Kinsman are the only two who have a chance at displacing someone in the top three.  For context: Tony Iseman gained 25 votes, Peter Blake gained 18 votes, Sue Kempf gained 20 — so it looks like either hardly any of the many outstanding votes got counted by chance … or there are just not more left to count, period.  We’ll continue watching this at least another day looking for a move from Christoph, who gained 30 votes or Kinsman, who gained 26.  The trend is against the leaders, but when you’re gaining in the single digits it’s hard to make up hundreds of votes.

Carole Moore, who is safe, picks up 35 votes.  Joe Railey picks up 29.  Judith Troutman picks up 44. The race for the second seat looks likely to be very close!

Mark Chirco (who gained 53 votes) and Shelley Hasselbrink (who gained 55) are safe.  Warren Kusomoto (very likely safe) picked up 41.  So the question is whether Tanya Doby can overtake Dean Grose.  Grose picked up 52 votes.  Doby picked up 57.  So the answer is: not likely enough to keep watching.  We will discontinue daily coverage of this race.

This one is in play.  Tim Stoaks picked up 136 votes; Duffield picked up 162.  The previous margin shrank by 26, to 320 votes.  At that rate, even if Duffield maintained an improbable rise in the provisionals period, he wouldn’t likely take the seat.

This is another one where I strongly suspect, without having sought or received evidence to back up my opinion, that Pulido’s people have been challenging provisional ballots from areas (and possibly ethnicities) that they believe will be more likely to support Tinajero.  If so, then the likelihood is good that Tinajero will eventually win — but his mayoral term will have a difficult birth.  Pulido picked up 1535 votes yesterday and Tinajero gained 1522 — barely budging the margin, which is now at 904,  The combined 3,057 votes counted contrasts sharply to the paltry additions to the vote totals in most other county races — perhaps of the greater difficulty anticipated with finding the owners of challenged ballots to verify their signatures.  Definitely not over until the last provisional is counted.

Ceci Iglesias had a huge lead of 2,394 over Nelida Mendoza — thanks partly to Mirna Velasquez, who has almost ten times that many votes.  Now, after picking up 1,253 votes to Mendoza’s 1,010 and Velasquez’s 762 — her lead stands at 2,637.  I know that this one is over, but I still plan to cover it for “can’t turn away from a car crash” reasons.

The battle is between incumbents Robert Collacott and Diana Fascenelli for the third of three open seats.  Colacott had led by 205; after gaining 3 votes to Fascenelli’s votes he’s now up 207.  It may be that all of Villa Park’s votes have been sitting somewhere yet uncounted, allowing for sudden huge reversal in this race — but for now there’s no point in watching it daily.  We will discontinue daily coverage of this race.

I’m still covering this only because of the possibility that non-Vietnamese provisionals (more likely to favor Jameson Power) are being withheld due to challenges from the GOP.  Chi Charlie Nguyen leads Power by 965 votes.  Nguyen picked up 199 votes; Power picked up 191.  I plan to call the ROV tomorrow to see what I can find out about obtaining information — ideally including names! — of challenged and uncounted provisionals.

The fact that the votes are unchanged since yesterday suggests that this one may be over.  But maybe it was luck of the draw.

Frank Cobo is not picking up ground for the third open seat.  He received 360 votes this day.  Margie Rice received 477; Sergio Contreras received 515; Andrew Nguyen received 467.  This one is over.  We will discontinue daily coverage of this race.

Incumbents Doug Reinhrdt up 361; Steve Lamar up 342; Peer Swan up 313; challenger Andrew Pollard is up 319.  Peer maintains almost all of his lead.

Katheryn Freshley is safe.  Mike Gaskins led Frederick Adjarian for the second seat by 580 votes.  Freshley picked up 75 votes, Gaskins 54 votes, and Ajarian 45 votes.  The lead is now 589 votes.

Kelly Jennings and Donald Froelich are safe.  In the race for the third seat, Bill Moorhead led Ken Maddox — no “Lopez” for this district, apparently — by 1420 votes.  Today, Jennings picked up 83 votes and Froelich picked up 67.  For the third seat, Moorhead picked up 62 votes and Maddox 54, stretching the lead to 1428.  Unless more votes start coming in, Maddox is toast, even if he starts out-gaining Moorhead.

This is just OC’s contribution to a statewide vote, but it was interesting yesterday both because of substantive factors — if this couldn’t pass here, where could it pass? — and statistical ones: the count vote was almost exactly tied, with a 58 vote lead for the NO vote out of over 944,000 votes cast.  Today it’s less interesting: with Democratic votes being counted late, the NO side now leads by almost 2,000 votes.  We will discontinue daily coverage of this race.

The YES side approving this hotel subsidy deal had led by 3,764 votes.  It gained 672 votes today, which the NO vote gained 685 votes.  That leaves it at 3,751 votes.  We’ve seen enough.  We will discontinue daily coverage of this race.

The YES side on this hotel subsidy had led by 3,868 votes.  It gained 663 votes.  The NO side gained 681 votes.  This match is over.  We will discontinue daily coverage of this race.

The minimum wage increase had led by 4,119 votes.  It now leads by 4,492 votes.  Fuhgeddaboudit.  We will discontinue daily coverage of this race.