By Adam Pagnucco.
At this point, school board candidates Rita Montoya (at-large), Natalie Zimmerman (District 2) and Laura Stewart (District 4) are leading in their races and support for Question A, which would change county executive term limits from three to two, is leading opposition. However, many mail ballots must still be counted. Could they change the apparent outcomes of these races?
First, let’s review the number of mail ballots at play. As of this writing, 191,961 mail ballots have been sent to voters and 79,519 have been counted. That means 112,442 more may still be counted.
But that “may” is highly conditional. First, not all of those ballots will contain votes for school board or term limits. At the moment, among the mail ballots that have already been counted, the percentages of those containing votes for school board are 73% in the at-large race, 73% in the District 2 race and 71% in the District 4 race. The percentage of mail ballots already counted that voted on the term limits question is 90%. Those undervoting rates must be included in projections of what the remaining mail ballots may contain.
Second, not all mail ballots get returned. The mail ballot return rates in the last four general elections were 82% in 2016, 80% in 2018, 92% in 2020 and 83% in 2022. The average is 84%. That’s probably a bit high because 2020 was a COVID outlier, but that’s the percentage I am going to use for this analysis.
Let’s plug in these factors and see what the remaining mail ballots would have to do to reverse the current apparent outcomes. An important caveat – this analysis does not include provisional ballots. More on that at the end of this column.
School Board At-Large
Challenger Rita Montoya is leading incumbent Lynne Harris by 53.2% to 45.8%. Harris is leading Montoya among mail ballots already counted by 50.5% to 49.0%.
At the above undervote rate of 73% and assuming an overall mail ballot return rate of 84%, my calculation is that Harris would have to get 69.0% of the outstanding mail ballots to flip the outcome. I don’t see any reason why she would gain almost 19 points in one batch of mail vs. another. Montoya wins.
School Board District 2
Natalie Zimmerman is leading Brenda Diaz by 55.0% to 44.3%. (Neither is an incumbent.) Zimmerman is leading Diaz among mail ballots already counted by 66.1% to 33.6%.
At the above undervote rate of 73% and assuming an overall mail ballot return rate of 84%, my calculation is that Diaz would have to get 78.4% of the outstanding mail ballots to flip the outcome. That won’t happen. Zimmerman wins.
School Board District 3
Challenger Laura Stewart is leading incumbent Shebra Evans by 57.5% to 41.5%. Stewart is leading Evans among mail ballots already counted by 60.8% to 38.6%.
At the above undervote rate of 71% and assuming an overall mail ballot return rate of 84%, my calculation is that Evans would have to get 91.2% of the outstanding mail ballots to flip the outcome. That won’t happen. Stewart wins.
Term Limits
It is mathematically impossible for the term limits result to flip. Why do I say that?
At this point, there are 252,226 votes for term limits and 119,538 votes against, a gap of 132,688. Even if every single outstanding mail ballot came in and every single one of them voted against term limits, there are only 112,442 total mail ballots still out there. It’s not enough to reverse the outcome no matter what they say.
Now this analysis excludes provisional ballots. In the 2020 school board general election, provisional ballots averaged 3.5% of total votes. That would be enough to make a difference in a really close race, but none of the school board contests are particularly close.
So I don’t think any of these results will change even though there are many more ballots to be counted. But there is one race out there that could flip: Congressional District 6. More on that soon.