Voting results released Friday night, a little after 8pm, showed an early lead for Rob Moore (24.1% of the vote) with Jeffrey Suzuki in second place (at 18.97%) and Rob Stump in third (at 17.71%), with Mary Badame trailing (at 16.77%), followed by Steve Raspe (at 13.21%) and Heidi Owens at (9.24%).
Just before the polls closed in Santa Clara County, more than a third of ballots had been returned (397,435—of which 2,461 were “challenged,” and 22,766 were “undeliverable.”) More than half (54%) of these were by Democrats, 22.8% were from “no party preference” voters, and 19.1% were from Republicans, followed by American Independent (2.8%), Libertarian (.6%), other (.4%) and Green (.3%).
Given that Moore and Suzuki are more progressive candidates, that leaves open the possibility that others could easily make up ground throughout the evening.
Residents are deciding who will be seated the three available Council jobs over the next four years. The candidates are Jeff Suzuki, an anti-racism activist as well as a Transportation and Complete Streets commissioner, Planning Commissioner Steve Raspe, Planning Commissioner Rob Stump, Santa Clara County employee Heidi Owens, current Mayor Rob Moore and former mayor and current Council member Mary Badame.
Measure N, the Los Gatos-Saratoga Union High School District School Bond (55% vote required to pass) was hanging in the balance with 54.41% in favor, with 10,842 votes counted.
There’s been plenty of twists and turns in this campaign, from public forums hosted by local broadcasters KCAT and Pirate Cat Radio, to an event at the Los Gatos Theatre put on by the Los Gatos Chamber of Commerce, to a face-off at The Terraces of Los Gatos senior living community.
On Friday, District 28 Assemblymember Gail Pellerin, who’s facing off against Republican Carol Pefley (Pellerin got 72% of the vote in the primary), told “Dangerous” Dan Orange on the Bushwhacker’s Breakfast Club program on 88.1FM in Santa Cruz that she’s had to miss a campaign event in Silicon Valley because she was stuck on the Santa Cruz County side of the hill—in a couple hours of traffic hell on Highway 17.
She also walked the former speaker at the Los Gatos Lions Club through how difficult it was to get a child marriage ban across the finish line—by using a “gut and amend” tactic, then waiting patiently for Governor Gavin Newsom who seemed to be taking his sweet time to approve it.
“It’s been an issue that this legislature has been working with for almost 10 years,” Pellerin said on the KZSC airwaves, noting Chelsea Clinton helped to push this issue to the forefront. “We just really saw the window, like, slightly open here. And we’re like, ‘We’ve gotta run with this, this year. So, I had a bill, AB1267, languishing in committee. So, I was able to take the contents of that bill, and dilute it and put in new language that would be our historic child marriage ban bill—that set 18 as the minimum age to marry, no exceptions.”
The original text was a substance use disorder bill, supported by Janus of Santa Cruz, but Pellerin said they’d discovered there was already a law on the books to address their concerns.
Pellerin said she was touched that Newsom held a signing ceremony for the new law.
“The governor invited survivors and advocates and authors,” she said, after which Dangerous Dan asked her about the uncertainty around whether Newsom was planning on signing the bill. “He likes drama…I had just driven back from Sacramento and got into my house, and got a phone call from the governor’s office that he was signing the bill the next day, and could I come up for a signing ceremony? I was exhausted.”
Luckily, her district director, Mary Anne Groen, signed up for driving duties back to the capitol.
On election night, there was a steady stream of vehicles passing by Pellerin’s former office—from when she was Santa Cruz County Clerk—as people inserted ballots into the drop box. And inside, an Uncle Sam skeleton saw behind another ballot box.
One of the election officials said she wasn’t too scared when the building was evacuated, a few days earlier, when a mysterious white powder billowed out of an envelope that had arrived at Jimmy Panetta’s office on the same floor. The product turned out to not be hazardous, though the incident shut down the courts and County government affairs for an entire day.
Panetta was expected to handily beat his Republican challenger, Peter Verbica (who got just 20.5% of the primary vote, to Panetta’s 58.4%).
