School board race left off handful of Santa Rosa ballots

Ann Schott knew something was up.

She’d been following the Santa Rosa City Schools Board of Trustees Area 1 race and had picked her candidate. She even had a yard sign. So when she made time to sit down and fill out her lengthy ballot, she noticed the school board contest was not there.

She checked the Santa Rosa City Schools website and examined the trustee area map. Her home on Beaver Street was in Area 1. So she called the Sonoma County Registrar of Voters.

You live in Area 3, she was told.

So, anxious about the timeline and keen to vote early, she mailed in her ballot. But something didn’t sit right.

“Either the map is wrong or the Registrar of Voters is wrong,” she remembers thinking.

So she sent a follow up email to the county.

“Even though I mailed it in I still wanted it in writing from the registrar that it was District 3 so that I knew I did everything I could to make sure that I wasn’t just letting it go by,” she said.

Turns out she wasn’t in Area 3. She in fact lives in Area 1. But her completed ballot was already on its way to be counted.

In response to her email, Sonoma County Clerk and Recorder Deva Proto immediately acknowledged the error and offered to have a correct ballot hand-delivered, Schott said.

“She bent over backward to try to make it right,” Schott said.

But in making a few calls to neighbors, Schott found her household was not the only one issued the incorrect ballot. Proto was doing the same digging.

It turns out that 18 residences with 32 registered voters received ballots that did not have the correct Santa Rosa City Schools Trustee Area 1 race included, Proto said.

When the school district moved from at-large to district elections in 2018, officials had to craft seven new districts. Schott’s portion of Beaver Street is on the northern border between Area 1 and Area 3. Because the district elections were phased in during two cycles, this is the first time voters in Area 1 have voted for their representative.

“It was just one portion of Beaver Street that was not assigned to the new district when they switched in 2018,” Proto said.

The issue was not widespread, Proto said, but she acknowledged the concern and its place among a wider discussion of worries — however unfounded — of voter fraud.

“We have over 300,000 voters in our county and we are looking at a very, very small amount,” she said.

An examination of voter records identified which of the 32 voters had already returned ballots and which had not been returned. Proto assigned supplemental, one-contest ballots to voters whose earlier votes had been processed and entirely new ballots to those whose ballots had not yet been counted.

“We are going to try to get them their ballots personally,” Proto said Friday. "I don’t want people to wait. It will be in a manila folder, with an enclosed letter and then the ballot, so they know what happened.”

Schott said her ballot was hand-delivered after 8 p.m. Friday.

Pat Crosley, another Beaver Street resident, said her ballot, too, was incorrect. She had already returned her completed ballot when she was alerted to the problem.

“I remember my ballot very well because I was working on it quite awhile,” she said. “It doesn’t feel like anything malicious or anything planned. It does seem like a mistake though, that should have been recognized.”

The mix-up comes at a time when record numbers of Sonoma County residents are voting early, in part because of the coronavirus pandemic, while President Donald Trump continues to foment fear of voter fraud, despite it being exceedingly rare.

The Brennan Center for Justice in 2017 ranked the risk of ballot fraud at 0.00004% to 0.0009%, based on studies of past elections, according to the Associated Press. In the five states that regularly send ballots to all voters who have registered, there have been no major cases of fraud or difficulty counting the votes.

The county’s efforts to quickly fix the mistake with her ballot was meaningful to Schott because any issue with voting in this election seems to take on magnified meaning in light of the tenor of national politics.

“It means a lot to me for two reasons — one that I have two children that are currently in Santa Rosa City Schools and I wanted a chance of my voice being heard,” she said. “And in general we all deserve to vote for the district we are in and when you deny people the choice for even voting, that is a problem for me. It should be a problem for everybody.”

Still Schott worried about even a few voters being discouraged by the mix-up, including those in her own home. Her husband and adult son spent a good deal of time going over the ballot before mailing theirs in. When the error came to light, they were spent, she said.

“They would have voted for that race if it were on the first ballot but they are just so exhausted with this process that they don’t want to deal with it,” she said.

Schott won them over. Her husband got a supplemental ballot with just the Trustee Area 1 race on it because his ballot had already been processed by county officials. Schott and her son, however, had to fill out an entirely new ballot because theirs had not yet been processed.

Even that had them both feeling just a touch uneasy. These are, after all, seemingly strange times.

“We are both kind of nervous that 10 years from now someone is going to accuse us of voting twice,” she said.

You can reach Staff Writer Kerry Benefield at 707-526-8671 or kerry.benefield@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @benefield.