Final results are in for SLO County’s primary election. Here’s who won
San Luis Obispo County on Wednesday announced certified results of the March 3 election — finalizing the decisions of the largest block of county voters to ever participate in a primary election.
All three incumbent candidates up for election on the county Board of Supervisors were reelected.
Debbie Arnold beat Ellen Beraud with 53% of the vote, John Peschong beat Stephanie Shakofsky with 66% of the vote, and Adam Hill beat Stacy Korsgaden with 51% of the vote.
That means the current board will be in power for at least two years, when supervisors Bruce Gibson and Lynn Compton will be up for reelection.
There remains some question about whether Hill will serve out his fourth term. He was hospitalized a little over a week after Election Day and has not appeared in public nor publicly spoken since, aside from a brief statement issued by him and his wife, Dee Torres-Hill.
In Oceano, a proposed tax to maintain fire services just barely failed to pass. It needed 66.67% of the vote and only 66.12% voted yes.
The fire tax would have passed with the support of a just a dozen residents.
A record number of 176,343 residents registered to vote before the early primary, and 63% of residents turned out to vote. That set a record for the most ballots ever cast for a primary election in the county.
These final election results come more than three weeks after Election Day, when the coronavirus was far off the horizon.
On the eve of the voting deadline, county clerk-recorder Tommy Gong announced that to prevent spread of the virus, residents would be allowed to bring their own pens to precincts to fill out their ballots.
The delay in final results is a result of a change in voter habits as a result of new state law to expand voter access.
Vote-by-mail ballots made up 79% of the ballots counted and they take longer to process. Some 23,000 people voted at the polls, including some voters who took advantage of a new law that allowed them to register to vote and vote on the same day.
How the public health emergency brought by the coronavirus pandemic might impact the presidential election scheduled for November is yet to be seen. That election will include local races for community service districts, school boards, city councils, and potential tax measures.
The COVID-19 outbreak could drastically impact pre-election voter outreach and campaigning. And just this week, Governor Gavin Newsom ordered that all voters must receive vote-by-mail ballots in three upcoming special elections.
