Several local school districts that floated losing school bond measures last week are already considering trying again in November.
Officials in Poway Unified, Cajon Valley, Lakeside and Chula Vista told VOSD’s Ashly McGlone they won’t rule out putting similar bond measures on the November 2020 ballot after the proposals floated last week failed to clear the required 55 percent threshold.
School bond measures across the state fared far worse than usual.
David Wolfe, legislative director for the Howard Jarvis Taxpayers Association, which opposes virtually all new tax hikes, called the bond measure failures up and down the state, “stunning … These are not bonds failing with 52, 53 percent. Some of these didn’t even get a majority vote. I’ve never seen that before.”
But supporters of the bonds “are wary of drawing wide-reaching conclusions and remain confident school facility bonds are still winnable issues with voters with better education and other changes next time around,” McGlone reports.
Election Results Update
Councilwoman Barbara Bry further cut into Councilman Scott Sherman’s lead for the second spot in November’s mayoral runoff Monday, with the latest batch of ballots taking his lead to 903 votes.
Michael Vu, the county’s registrar of voters, said in a Monday interview trhat the Registrar has now counted virtually all of the mail ballots. The remaining ballots are predominantly provisional ballots, meaning they will undergo some scrutiny before being officially tallied.
“Provisionals take so much longer to process,” Vu said. “Things will get down to a crawl because of the amount of time it takes to process a provisional ballot.”
There are 90,000 remaining uncounted votes in the county. Vu said his office does not know how many of those votes are in the city of San Diego, or any other specific district.
Will Moore also continues to extend his lead for second place in the City Council District 1 race, as does Nora Vargas in the County Supervisor District 1 race. And Measure C now stands at 64.84 percent approval. It needs to reach 66.6666666666667 percent* to be approved without a lengthy legal fight.
*Rough approximation.
- Vu also told us that the Registrar is looking to make a welcome change come November.
Like others around the state, Vu reports results beginning on election night by announcing the percentage of precincts that have reported their results.
But that does not mean what most people think it means. The “percent of precincts reporting” figure excludes votes cast by mail and provisional ballots, for instance. That leads to the counter-intuitive situation in which the results page says 100 percent of precincts have reported – leading a rational person to believe they’re looking at final results – when there are in fact hundreds of thousands of uncounted votes.
Last week, Andrew Keatts tweeted an argument that this practice no longer makes sense, and should stop. Vu said Monday that he saw the tweet, and agreed.
He said he would look into changing the reporting system in November.
“It’s a legacy thing, but the behavior and culture of how we vote and how we count votes has changed,” Vu said. “We’ll take a look at that and see if we can get that better clarified for the next go around.”
Speaking of November …
- The City Council will consider placing a measure on the November ballot that would switch San Diego to ranked choice voting, 10News reports.
- Assemblywoman Shirley Weber on Tuesday will detail an effort to repeal Prop. 209, passed in 1996, which banned affirmative action in college admissions.
What Coronavirus Means for the Border
A Customs and Border Protection spokesman told VOSD’s Maya Srikrishnan in the latest Border Report about the protocols the agency is following as it processes people’s entry into the country amid the coronavirus outbreak: “CBP officers are using a combination of traveler history records, officer questioning and observation, and self-declarations to identify people who may need additional health screening,” Srikrishnan reports.
The spokesman also said that there aren’t currently any plans to close the San Ysidro Port of Entry. For now, Baja California doesn’t appear to have any confirmed cases of the virus.
In Other News
- The U-T profiled Michael McConnell, the homeless advocate whose spending against Measure C might have killed the measure.
- It’s possible that Democrats could have an 8-1 majority on the City Council come November.
- San Diego Magazine tried to find the oldest tree in San Diego.
The Morning Report was written by Sara Libby and Andrew Keatts, and edited by Scott Lewis.