But it’s too late to fix it now.
According to the final March 2024 election results, incumbent Supervisor Maureen Mulheren won over challenger Jacob Brown by just 116 votes out of a total of 3282 votes, 1699 for Mulheren to 1583 for Brown. (116 is about 3.5 percent of 3282.)
Readers may recall that the March 4 election was botched twice, and both of those blunders affected the close Mulheren-Brown race.
The first botch was when the ballot printing vendor wrongly sent misprinted fourth-district Republican ballots to everyone in the County, instead of ballots tailored for the particular races in each district. That error was belatedly fixed when replacement ballots were be re-issued, the vendor absorbing the cost of fixing it. The impact of this error on the Mulheren-Brown race may have been small, but the number of affected Second District ballots is not clear because the County elections office cannot be sure if every voter in the second district (mainly the City of Ukiah) ended up voting and voting correctly despite the ballot printing error.
The second botch is more complicated. It had to do with some voters being assigned to the wrong supervisorial district in the wake of the 2021 countywide redistricting. Some Mulheren-Brown voters received ballots for the wrong supervisorial district, some were not sent ballots because they were incorrectly assigned to the wrong district.
The Election Botches of March 2024 arose again last month because it became a major subject of the recently completed $800,000 State Audit.
The State Auditor described Botch #2 this way:
“In a Second Ballot Error, the Elections Office Assigned at Least 177 Voters to Incorrect Voting Precincts…”
“Shortly after the Elections Office resolved the ballot printing error, it discovered an additional error. The Elections Office told us [the State Auditor] it received phone calls on February 20, 2024, from a voter and a candidate running for office about voters being assigned to incorrect supervisorial districts. After looking further into these concerns, the county determined that it had assigned 177 voters to the wrong precincts and, because of that, the wrong supervisorial districts. Consequently, these voters either received ballots with incorrect information about the district supervisors for which they could vote or didn’t get a ballot with the Supervisors candidates on it.
“For example, the county mistakenly sent a voter who resided in the 1st supervisorial district [Redwood/Potter Valley] a ballot that gave them the chance to vote only in the 2nd district supervisor race. Of the 177 voters the county identified, the most common error was that the county sent 5th district ballots to 89 voters who lived in the 1st district. These ballots did not present these 89 voters with an option for voting for supervisor, even though the voters should have been presented with an option to vote in the 1st district supervisor race. These incorrect ballots resulted from errors that the Elections Office made after the county’s 2021 redistricting effort. …
“The resulting supervisorial district boundary lines were different from those that had previously existed, meaning that some voters who had once been in one supervisorial district now lived in a new district. Because of this, the Elections Office needed to reassign the affected voters to new precincts [with different races].
“However, the Elections Office’s approach to assigning voters to new precincts proved to be incomplete. Elections Office staff described to us that they visually inspected maps of the county to determine when voters registered at specific addresses were now located in new districts. The Elections Office staff explained that they then inputted the corresponding adjustments to voter precinct assignments into the office’s elections management system and only later realized that the changes they had entered for some voters had not taken effect. This process left at least 177 voters in incorrect voting precincts. …
“At least”? How many more could there be? And how many voters just declined to vote or didn’t vote for Supervisor given the confusion and mistakes?
The State Auditor continued: “One race up for vote in the March 2024 primary election was potentially affected by the voters who cast ballots that did not include the proper races. The race was for the board of supervisor position in the 2nd district. [Mulheren vs. Brown] One hundred thirty-seven (137) 2nd district voters used a misprinted ballot to vote, meaning that they cast ballots that did not include the 2nd district supervisor race. The margin of victory in this race was 116 votes, 21 fewer than the number of 2nd district voters who used misprinted ballots. When the Elections Office remade the 137 incorrect ballots [by manually transferring votes from the misprinted ballots to correctly printed ballots], it generally would not have been able to transfer and count votes for the 2nd district supervisor race because that race did not appear on the misprinted ballots used by those voters.
“Instead, the Elections Office would have been dependent on whether the voters wrote in their vote for the 2nd district supervisor race. Because of our [the State Auditor’s] inability to know how the 137 voters would have voted if they had used the correct ballot, we do not make any conclusions about whether the error affected the outcome of that race.”
State election law puts a significant burden on any requester of an election recount. The recount request must be made within five days of the Elections office’s “certification” (typically 30 days after an election). And the requester is responsible for the cost of the recount — unless the recount shows that the requester won, at which time the requester’s money is refunded.
The State Auditor does not provide the timing of these ballot error disclosures as they apply to the March 2024 Second District race. So we don’t know if candidate Jacob Brown had the information necessary to consider requesting a recount in the time allowed, although the race was close. Given the confusion in the wake of the initial ballot printing error followed by the precinct/district assignment error, it may not have been clear what the problem was, how significant it was, what the effect was, or what the chances of success would have been in that limited five-day window after certification.
In any event, no recount was requested and Mulheren was certified as the winner.
For now Mr. Brown must settle for an unsatisfying consolation prize hoping that such ballot and district assignment errors won’t happen again.
County Elections Officer Katrina Bartolomie didn’t respond to our inquiry on the subject. But she told the State Auditor that:
“The Elections Office has contracted with a consultant who is assisting with redistricting for AB 604 – Congressional Redistricting, which is currently being processed…”
Figuring out how to implement Governor Newsom’s recent Anti-Trump Congressional Redistricting Proposition will be another unique challenge for the County’s elections and computer staff.
Bartolomie continued, “The Elections Office also intends to use this consultant to review all voting districts within the County to ensure that all voters are assigned the correct precincts.”
We understand that the 2021 redistricting also produced some “split precincts” making the voter precinct assignments even trickier.
“Additionally,” Bartolomie added, “Elections Office staff recently met with the County’s GIS Administrator to see what can be done to create a mapping system to use for responding to district boundary changes that will make it easier to identify changes in district boundary lines.”
“Seeing what can be done” does not inspire confidence. Creation of a new elections mapping system is a major and costly undertaking. We don’t know how much the consultant that the Elections office “intends” to use for reviewing ALL voting districts will cost. Further, just hiring a consultant will not address the deeper problems with the County’s outdated and error prone election and precinct mapping systems. But we doubt that Supervisor Mulheren will be asking any questions about it.
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