More than 1,000 votes still to be counted
Residents of Santa Monica and Malibu may have to wait until as late as Monday for the final results of the Measure S vote that took place Tuesday.
About 1,000 votes remain to be counted and though officials hope to make an informal announcement today, the final tally may not be handed down for several days.
Measure S, which requires two-thirds of the vote to become law, would generate roughly $6.5 million annually for the local school district by levying a flat $225 parcel tax on each of the 32,400-plus pieces of property in Santa Monica and Malibu. The measure would last for six years.
Of the 16,892 ballots cast Tuesday, Measure S garnered 66.8 percent, or just 17 votes more than the mandated-two-thirds. But with roughly 850 absentee ballots still to be counted and about 325 provisional ballots that need to be verified and counted, the election could swing either way.
Provisional ballots are those given to voters whose names do not appear on polling place voter lists.
Officials spent Wednesday separating the Santa Monica-Malibu ballots from the roughly 2,800 last-minute votes, which came in for various elections that took place throughout Los Angeles County on Tuesday.
Once the Santa Monica-Malibu ballots were separated, workers began the laborious task of verifying signatures and preparing the votes to be counted.
3EA,“We are processing what we can,” said Marcia Ventura, a spokeswoman for the L.A. County Registrar-Recorder’s office in Norwalk. “But it is a manual process.”
The counting is expected to begin tomorrow, Ventura said.
The bottom line, by all accounts, is that the Measure S election could go either way.
If the final results are as close as they were on Tuesday night, residents may have to wait even longer for a final word because those involved on either side of the issue could request a recount.
“Hopefully we won’t need to have a recount,” said local architect Ralph Mechur, co-chair of the campaign in favor of Measure S. “But with a razor-thin margin, it’s hard to know.”
“Hopefully we won’t need to have a recount. But with a razor-thin margin, it’s hard to know.” — — RALPH MECHUR Co-chair of campaign in favor of Measure S
Mat Millen, who heads Citizens Against Unfair Taxes, said he may ask for a recount if the returns don’t come back in his favor.
“If it stays the same and if I can raise the funds, I’m going to ask for a recount,” he said, adding that he was already researching the procedure and costs associated with such an undertaking.
“If it stays the same and if I can raise the funds, I’m going to ask for a recount.” — — MAT MILLEN Citizens Against Unfair Taxes
Anybody can request a recount, though that person must pay for it. The request must come within five days of the formal election announcement and the cost can range from $2,000 all the way up into the tens of thousands of dollars, Ventura said.
The price tag for demanding a recount depends on two things: How many precincts are counted and how many boards (groups of four workers) the person that asks for the recount wants working simultaneously.
Four people have to verify each vote by hand. The cost per day is $1,962 for one board, $3,142 for two boards and $4,322 for three boards, according to documents from the L.A. County Registrar-Recorder.
Mechur said if Measure S loses and his group decides to request a recount, they would probably look first at absentee ballots.
But both sides said they need to raise more money and devise a strategy before staging a recount.
Supporters of Measure S raised more than $200,000 and spent it on a finely-tuned campaign that targeted regular voters, Democrats and parents with children in local schools. They hired two campaign consultants and produced a handful of mailers, in the end outspending their competition by $193,000.
Millen’s group raised only about $7,000 and spent it on a couple hundred lawn signs and a single mailer. Millen and his supporters said Wednesday that the margin of votes sends a clear message that residents feel the tax is unfair.
“It was a bought election,” he said. “I spent about a buck and a quarter a vote and they spent about $20 a vote.”
Mat Millen
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on June 5, 2003. Read the original PDF.