Sonoma County among slowest in state to post election results

Sonoma County was among the slowest of the state’s 58 counties to post results online from Tuesday’s election, lagging so far behind that at 1 a.m. - when it had published results from less than a third of precincts - nearly every other county had completed preliminary counts.

The slow process left numerous races throughout the county without updates for hours after polls closed at 8 p.m., frustrating candidates and political junkies. Many had to stay up past 1:30 a.m. to get the first results from precincts in some contests.

“At 1:15 a.m., Sonoma County now has the distinction of having smallest (percentage) of precincts counted,” Paul Andersen, a Petaluma political consultant, posted on Twitter early Wednesday. “We really set a record.”

Healdsburg City Council candidate Brigette Mansell said she went to bed at 12:30 a.m. Wednesday knowing only the mail-in ballot results in her race, posted by the county shortly after the polls closed at 8 p.m. Tuesday.

“Sure, it was disconcerting,” said Mansell, a political newcomer who trails Jeff Civian by 10 votes for the second council seat. Mansell said she and others gathered at a neighbor’s home to watch the returns come in and “nothing was going on.”

Sonoma County elections officials on Wednesday blamed the delay on a breakdown in their online server.

Officials said they counted ballots on Tuesday evening and posted the results on their website, but a problem with the server prevented the election totals from displaying online.

“Really the issue was - we discovered - that we were posting the results but they were not getting on the Web,” said Bill Rousseau, the county’s registrar of voters. “When we discovered it, I spent the rest of the night working with IT to fix the problem. The server had totally shut down.”

On Tuesday night, however, elections officials offered a different explanation, saying the count was hindered by the time-consuming delivery of ballots from far-flung precincts.

“People want everything right now,” said Gloria Colter, the chief deputy registrar of voters. “We don’t have them in-house so we can’t count them. As soon as they get them here we count them.”

Sonoma County has a long history of delayed election results, typically due to the late arrival of mail-in ballots as well as provisional ballots that can’t be counted on election night.

County officials have blamed the delays on the increasing popularity of mail-in ballots and the tendency of thousands of voters to hold onto them until Election Day.

David Rabbitt, chairman of the Board of Supervisors, said the board this year set aside $500,000 to study buying new election equipment that would replace the county’s 30-year-old vote counting system.

“There are not a lot of options out there for voting systems,” he said. “We do have a system that is fragile. To that end, we have set aside the initial investment. We will need an additional investment.”

Election officials had counted 110,644 ballots by Tuesday night. Those included 32,001 votes cast at 417 precincts on Tuesday and 78,643 mail-in ballots received by Sunday. Rousseau estimated that an additional 25,000 to 50,000 ballots could remain uncounted. That sum includes mail-in ballots received Monday and Tuesday, mail-in ballots dropped off Tuesday and provisional ballots.

“We will start processing those ballots this week. There is a lot of work left to be done,” Rousseau said.

Officials have until Dec. 2 to certify the election results. Rousseau said it will likely take his staff of 80 the entire month to work through the uncounted ballots. While other counties release interim results, Sonoma County will not provide updated counts until the final certification, Rousseau said.

Among close contests that could be impacted by the uncounted ballots are races for Petaluma mayor, Healdsburg City Council and the West Sonoma County Union High School District.

With the ballots counted so far, voter turnout in Sonoma County stands at 45 percent, and Rousseau predicted it could reach 55 or 60 percent after all the ballots are totaled. That would be below the 70 percent he predicted before Election Day based on 177,612 ballots mailed out. The county had 244,556 registered voters in Tuesday’s election.

“I wanted to be optimistic,” Rousseau said. “It’s tough to tell final turnout until all the vote-by-mail ballots are counted.”

Rousseau said that his office would make sure the technology is in place to avoid a glitch in reporting the results for next election.

“The only discussion we can have now is to make sure we have the safeguards in place to make sure this doesn’t happen again,” he said. “If you were in our office on election night, you could have seen the results come in. We were posting them every hour, they just weren’t going to the server.”

Many observers who went without the election night updates vented their frustration on social media. Some even blamed the county for lost sleep.

“Going to work late today and blaming it on Sonoma County’s Registrar of Voters,” tweeted Petaluma resident Sheri Cardo.

Staff Writer Guy Kovner ?contributed to this report.