Fresno Co. sheriff candidates surprised

Neither expected the race would be so close.

Published online on Thursday, Nov. 09, 2006

Fresno County's two candidates for sheriff were shaking their heads in disbelief Wednesday at the whisker-thin margin that separates them, and the month it may take to settle who won.

With all precincts reporting, Assistant Sheriff Margaret Mims led retired California Highway Patrol Capt. Calvin Minor by just 155 votes.

An estimated 20,000 absentee and provisional ballots remain to be counted — about 13% of the roughly 154,000 ballots cast — and elections officials expect the lead to flip-flop numerous times before an outright winner is declared.

"It's not over yet," Fresno County Clerk Victor Salazar said Wednesday.

"What we did see last night was a constant shift in positioning, and I fully expect that to continue. I think this is going to be a very, very tight race."

So tight, in fact, that both candidates said they won't rule out the possibility of a recount after the election is certified.

The county has 29 days to certify the results. A candidate requesting a recount must cover its costs, whether the work is done manually or by machine.

Both candidates remain optimistic and say the results, so far, have been surprising. Minor, who celebrated his 58th birthday Wednesday, said he was disappointed a winner wasn't declared Tuesday.

"I thought we would do much better than we did," said a weary Minor, who spent the day celebrating his birthday at his Sanger home with family. "But there is nothing I can do. Sure, we got into this to win, but you've got to have the realization you may not."

Mims, 52, also wasn't expecting such a close race. All she can do now, she said, is wait.

"There's nothing else I can do at this point for votes. I just have to be patient," said Mims, who squeezed in a midmorning nap before cleaning out her campaign headquarters in the afternoon. "There's just no way to know what will happen."

Precinct-level returns show that Mims captured more than two-thirds of the votes in southwest Fresno and more than half of the votes in central Fresno, south of Shaw. Minor received more than half of the votes in north Fresno and Clovis. He also received the majority of votes in the foothills, Sierra and far western Fresno County.

Not everyone who cast a ballot voted for a sheriff candidate.

Nearly 8,000 residents left that race blank on the ballot. That's fewer than have passed over other countywide races in the past, but a significant number when a race is close and every vote counts, a political expert said.

"It's a big number if all those people had voted and broke for one candidate or another," said Kenneth Hansen, an assistant professor of political science at California State University, Fresno.

Salazar concurs: "That could have been the difference one way or another."

Election workers are now sorting through the estimated 20,000 absentee and provisional ballots that came into the elections office before the polls closed at 8 p.m. Tuesday.

Provisional ballots are cast when there is an unanswered question about a person's voting status at a precinct. The elections office then must verify eligibility.

Processing both types is time-consuming, Salazar said.

About 30 election workers were hard at work processing ballots by midafternoon Wednesday.

Hundreds of sealed absentee ballots lined trays in the elections office, with workers verifying voter signatures.

Provisional ballots can take even longer to process because election workers must determine whether residents are qualified to vote, verify their signatures and figure out what races they are eligible to vote in.

Those outstanding ballots are weighing heavily on the mind of both candidates. Mims said she realized during the campaign that the absentee ballots could make a difference in the race, so she targeted absentee voters.

She got a list from the elections office of people registered to vote absentee then sent mailers to their homes. Every time the elections office updated its list, Mims' campaign updated hers and sent mailers to those households, she said.

Whether that will help Mims win remains to be seen.

"I think it's going to help, if they are the absentees [voters] that we mailed to," she said.

Minor didn't focus on absentee voters. He said Tuesday that might have been a bad decision.

"We didn't have the money at that time to do an absentee mailer," he said. "You look back, tacticallywise, that was probably a mistake."

Salazar expects that his office will have processed several thousand more ballots by this afternoon.

Results will be posted on the election Web site at 4 p.m. Further updates will be made every Friday.

The candidates are battling to replace Sheriff Richard Pierce, who chose not to run for a third term in January. The new sheriff will take office Jan. 8 and earn $145,380 a year.