November 10, 2020 at 10:09 am

A week after Election Day, the San Joaquin Registrar of Voters is still tabulating votes. More than 186,000 ballots have already been counted, pushing turnout to more than 50%. A couple of races in the county are still incredibly close, with margins of a few hundred or even dozens of votes.

Kevin Lincoln’s lead over Michael Tubbs for Stockton mayor has grown to 4,265 votes, more than 6.7 percentage points. Roughly 63,000 votes have been counted out of 139,000 registered voters in the city. Lincoln currently has 33,727 votes (53.37%) to Tubbs’ 29,462 (46.63%). Turnout in the mayor’s race is still behind 2016 levels, when Tubbs won his first term. Almost 80,000 votes were cast.

The race for the Stockton Unified School District Board of Education in Area 3 got very close over the weekend between Valentino Silva and Alicia Rico. There are three other candidates vying for the seat, but none of them have obtained more than 20% of the vote.

Silva led Rico by just over 100 votes on election night. His lead has since shrunk to 16 votes, or less than half a percentage point. He currently has 1,100 votes (33.4%) to Rico’s 1,084 (32.95%). Almost 3,300 ballots have been counted in the race out of 9,300 registered voters. For comparison, 4,560 people voted in the race in 2016.

In Tracy Unified, three board seats are open, all elected at-large. One incumbent, Jeremy Silcox, is 930 votes shy of retaining his seat. The current top three are Ana Blanco (11,220 votes, 18.3%), Nathalia Hughes Erskine (9,899 votes, 16.15%), and Zachary Hoffert (9,707 votes, 15.84%).

Silcox currently has 8,777 votes (14.32%) and is trailing Hoffert by 1.5 percentage points. Roughly 29,900 ballots have been counted, with more than 55,000 registered voters in the district.

The contest for the Ripon Consolidated Fire District has also narrowed. The top three of the four candidates running will receive seats on the board. Ryan Mackey and Larry Madoski are firmly in the top two with 30% each. Matt Cultrera currently holds a 10-vote edge for the third-place spot, 2,615 votes (19.6%) to 2,605 votes (19.5%) for Sheri Coburn. Around 6,700 ballots out of 11,800 registered voters have been counted so far, a turnout of 57%.

There are currently 65,580 ballots left to be counted, the majority of them vote-by-mail. The San Joaquin County Registrar of Voters is processing roughly 28,000 ballots with each results update. At the current pace, the count should be largely finished by Friday.

None of the 6,300 provisional ballots in the county have been counted, as the registrar needs to verify that the ballots belong to registered voters who have not already voted in the election. There are also more than 59,000 vote-by-mail ballots that have not yet been processed.