30,000 ballots still uncounted in Sonoma County

Sonoma County election workers have processed and counted about 13,000 more ballots, though several local races still too close to call will have to wait at least until Friday, when the county’s top election official hopes the final batch of about 30,000 ballots will be processed.

As of Tuesday evening, the county reported 238,520 ballots cast and counted in the Nov. 3 general election. The county’s registrar of voters, Deva Proto, estimates that about 30,000 ballots remain outstanding.

“Hopefully most of those will be posted Friday,” Proto said.

Tuesday’s update was the latest since Friday, when the county posted results incorporating about 25,000 additional ballots counted after Election Day. About 200,000 ballots were included in the initial results posted after polls closed.

While most federal, state and local races can e bcalled, some races remain too tight to project the winner.

Less than 300 votes separate the top two candidates for the Santa Rosa City Council’s District 7 seat, where Natalie Rogers, a marriage and family therapist, had 4,016 votes, or about 43%, and Eric Christensen, owner of a visual special effects company, had 3,787 votes, or about 40%.

Election officials don’t know where outstanding ballots are from until they’re scanned and processed into the county’s system, Proto has said.

Measure O, a proposed countywide sales tax for mental health and homeless services, continued to be above the two-thirds threshold needed to pass, and it would take a significant drop in support among the outstanding ballots for it to fail. It was at just over 68% as of Tuesday, and assuming each of the remaining roughly 30,000 ballots voted on Measure O, it would only need about 58% support to pass.

In Petaluma, longtime Councilman Mike Healy continued to lead challenger Lizzie Wallack for the city’s third at-large council seat. Healy led by about 550 votes on Tuesday, receiving 13.3% of the vote to Wallack’s 12.7%.

An even tighter margin exists in Sebastopol, where Councilwoman Neysa Hinton leads Evert Fernandez by 21 votes for that city’s second at-large council seat.

You can reach Staff Writer Will Schmitt at 707-521-5207 or will.schmitt@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @wsreports.