Three candidates, some waiting

The voting is over in Sonoma County’s First Supervisorial District – and now, the waiting begins.
Tuesday’s election failed to immediately resolve the question of who’ll represent Sonoma Valley at the county level for the next four years. Although two-term incumbent Valerie Brown failed to gain the needed 50 percent to retain her Board of Supervisors seat, she racked up nearly twice the votes of her nearest contender, Will Pier. Preliminary results show Brown in the lead with 9,422 votes (44.2 percent), Pier at 4,796 (22.5 percent) and David Reber with 4,335 votes (20.4 percent).
The less-than-50 percent tally means a Nov. 4 runoff between the top two vote-getters – but who that is won’t be known for certain until the absentee and provisional ballots are counted.
And that might take a while.
“I don’t even have a ballpark right now – I don’t know when we’ll know,” assistant Registrar Of Voters Gloria Colter said Thursday morning. “I’d like to see us complete this within the next two weeks but I can’t make any guarantees.”
Tueday’s turnout was a relatively low 37.7 percent across the county. Provisional and absentee ballots can be dropped off at any polling place – not just in the precinct where the voter may live – and are separated out from the regular ballots. Colter’s staff is engaged in the painstaking task of opening each envelope, matching each ballot to its originating precinct and checking the signature to make sure no one voted twice.
Brown had not yet responded to telephone calls by presstime, and Reber Thursday morning offered “no comment until the official tally is in and we really know what it’ll be.” Pier said he wasn’t waiting for the final results, but was “calling people, writing people for more endorsements, doing fundraising, making plans.”
“Thanks to all of my supporters, and we’re hoping with the November elections bringing more people out to vote it’ll mean way more votes for me,” he said.
The county has 28 days to complete its canvass and certify the election, but Colter said that at this point there’s no way to even tell how many ballots remain to be counted.
“We don’t do updates from day to day, we just go through the entire process and do it all at one time,” Colter said. “We don’t like to have any room for error at all in these situations, because they can be challenged.”
Ten years ago, Sonoma saw the closest election in the county’s history – with one vote apiece separating City Council contenders Larry Barnett, Ken Brown and Dick Dorf. That race, which went through three separate hand counts, put incumbent Barnett and newcomer Brown on the council and unseated incumbent Dorf, who considered but didn’t issue a recount challenge.
Colter said she hadn’t heard of a local recount since she began working for the county in 1980. She said that the less-than-500-vote margin between Pier and Reber is heightening electoral interest, but emphasized that it’s still a waiting game, adding, “We just ask people to please be patient.”