It's over.
In the final vote counting Friday, June 8, Jamie Irons for mayor and Christine Johnson and Noah Smukler for city council received more than the 50% of the votes needed to win in the Morro Bay primary election, giving them a majority on the five-member council when they are seated in late November or early December. All but a handful of votes were left to be counted, and those 63 uncounted votes could not change the outcome now.
The election of Irons, Johnson, and Smukler (the latter for a second four-year term on the council) will radically transform the council majority in terms of values, ideology, and character, all focused primarily on the public interest — the needs of residents — not mainly on business, developers and special interests as the current council and many before have been known for.
The current council is composed of mayor Bill Yates and council members Carla Borchard, Nancy Johnson, and George Leage. Borchard finished a distant second in the balloting for mayor and Yates third in the final vote counting Friday. Borchard's term on the council expires in November.
The four-year terms of Nancy Johnson and Leage expire in 2014. Joan Solu and James R. Hayes finished third and fourth in the council voting, far behind Christine Johnson and Smukler.
The election of Irons, Christine Johnson, and Smukler also represents the biggest change on the council in about 20 years, resulting in one of the most community-minded councils since the city was incorporated in 1964.
The results are not official until Julie Rodewald, the county clerk-recorder, certifies the vote count, and city clerk Jamie Boucher confirms that that the 50% plus majority of Irons, Johnson, and Smuckler under the California Election Code means they are officially elected. All that is expected to take place in the next two weeks.
The election campaigns conducted by Irons, Johnson, and Smukler and coordinated by Walter Heath almost certainly surpassed the effective organization and efficacy of all past campaigns. They used going door-to-door (known as walking precincts), phone banking (calling registered voters to seek their support) and many supporters to help with those tasks, and campaign literature mailed to registered voters — all to reach out to prospective voters.
They had many campaign signs posted in front of houses throughout the town. Borchard, Solu, and Hayes also had their signs posted around town but far fewer than Irons, Johnson, and Smukler. Most of Solu's signs were at motels and hotels downtown (she is a motel owner). Yates, who will end his third term as mayor in November or December, had only a handful of signs outside of his residential neighborhood and Hayes only a few more than Yates.
The election results are clear but confusion still remains about the reporting of the results.
The California Election Code Section 8140 clearly states:
"Any candidate for a nonpartisan office who at a primary election receives votes on a majority of all the ballots cast for candidates for that office shall be elected to that office."
The clerk-recorder's site starting late on June 5 posted results both as "ballots cast" and "votes cast," but the Morro Bay election results were only given as percentages of the votes cast, which did not give Christine Johnson and Smukler winning majorities. But when calculated as "ballots cast," they receive more than 50% majorities — and that is what the Elections Code requires.
On Friday, a new chart showing percentages of votes won by the candidates based on ballots cast was posted on that site. This conforms to the Elections Code, but now the site has two sets of election results in terms of percentages.
Before that, many who viewed the clerk-recorder election results in hopes of finding out who "won" said they were puzzled by the ordinal site chart showing two sets of votes with the percentages showing Johnson, Smukler, Solu, and Hayes were headed for a runoff at the November 6 election, which was false information. That was underscored when city attorney Rob Schultz and Irons-Johnson-Smukler supporters contended the Elections Code did not support that conclusion.
The clerk-recorder's site did not explain any of this, and neither did Schultz in a news release issued June 6 pointing out that Code section 8140 requires the votes to be calculated as "ballots cast" in determining the percentages of votes received by the candidates. But the release made no mention of the difference between ballots cast and votes cast and did not seek to clear up the confusion between the two, or why the clerk-recorder's site was reporting the results inaccurately.
Rodewald was not available for comment. The difference between ballots cast and votes cast has not yet been explained by those in authority.
Final results posted on the clerk-recorder's site based on ballots cast:
CITY OF MORRO BAY MAYOR
JAMIE IRONS 51.89%
CARLA BORCHARD 20.48%
WILLIAM YATES 19.78%
JOE YUKICH 5.31%
CITY OF MORRO BAY COUNCILMEMBER
NOAH SMUKLER 63.59%
CHRISTINE JOHNSON 54.53%
JOAN SOLU 29.27%
JAMES R. HAYES 22.75%
