Recount in Paulding-Compton race is 25% complete — and turns up no discrepancies

With 25% of ballots recounted so far in the San Luis Obispo County Board of Supervisors’ District 4 race, here’s how many votes have changed: zero.

As of Friday, five precincts had been counted. The tally was 3,164 votes for Jimmy Paulding and 2,196 for incumbent Supervisor Lynn Compton — exactly the same as the original count for those precincts.

Certified election results showed that Paulding won the election by 639 votes. Despite the large gap, that outcome was challenged by Paso Robles resident Darcia Stebbens.

Stebbens — whose request for a recount has the backing of the local Republican Party — told a Tribune reporter she asked for it to motivate the county to improve its elections process.

So far, the county’s accuracy rate is 100% for the precincts that have been reexamined. That could change, but it’s highly doubtful that it will be anything more than a minuscule difference.

Will that be enough to satisfy the local Republican Party hierarchy, or Supervisor Debbie Arnold, who — to quote a GOP email to members — voted “no confidence” in the primary election process?

It appears unlikely.

Remember, Arnold was the lone supervisor to vote against certifying the election results on July 19.

That’s a rare — if not unprecedented — move in San Luis Obispo County. The Republican Party is right; it’s absolutely a vote of no confidence in our elections process.

Arnold tried to soften the blow by saying she has faith in the SLO County elections staff.

“This is not a criticism of our staff,” she said. “It didn’t make the changes in our election process that I believe led to serious vulnerabilities. So they’re doing their job. They’re working really hard.”

The supervisor aired a laundry list of concerns about the “vulnerabilities” of voting machines, about the all-mail voting process and about the security of drop boxes.

She also expressed admiration for the private citizens who have given “time and money” to make the recount possible. (The recount will cost over $100,000 if all ballots are counted again.)

“.... this is not to change the election results,” Arnold said of the recount, “but to restore confidence in the election process.”

If only we could believe that.

Unfortunately, the conspiracy theories spread by MAGA election deniers don’t stop with vote counting.

They have tried multiple ways to discredit the process, by suggesting that ballots are cast illegally, that filled-in ballots are lost, that unauthorized people transport ballots from drop boxes — implying ballots are somehow tampered with in the process.

Who knows if they actually believe the conspiracy theories — or are trying to pave the way for radical changes to the voting process to “cure” these problems that don’t exist.

Here’s what the group supporting the recount, the San Luis Obispo County Citizens Action Team, is calling for:

• Purging voter rolls
• Requiring voter ID
• Election Day voting only
• Smaller voting precincts
• Making Election Day a full or half-day holiday
• Counting ballots on election night and following up with machine counting

These are not new asks. Hand counting, in particular, has been the holy grail for election deniers.

Yet hand-counting is not infallible either, as a 2012 Election Law Journal article on post-election auditing found.

“Even with the relatively simple task of manually counting ballots, error is ever-present,” it concluded.

There is little doubt that if hand-counting were to replace machine counting, there would still be complaints about accuracy, along with allegations that election workers had somehow rigged the outcome.

Remember the old saying, “Haters gonna hate?”

Well, election deniers are gonna deny — no matter what ballot-counting system is used.

We anticipate that the recount will vindicate the county election team’s ballot-counting process.

Will it stop the nasty, far-fetched rumors of voting “irregularities”?

Don’t count on it.

This editorial has been updated to correct recount totals and to add comments by Supervisor Debbie Arnold.

This story was originally published August 1, 2022 at 2:44 PM.