SLO County recount wasn’t about the vote. It was performance art | Opinion
The recount of the 2nd District supervisor contest is over, but I suspect its backers aren’t finished trying to overturn Bruce Gibson’s victory.
Lifting a page from the national election-denial playbook, they may take their complaints to court, claiming “fraud,” “corruption.”
I was one of three primary observers — with retired Appellate Court Justice Marty Tangeman and local Democratic Party stalwart Susan Devine — who watched the painstaking recount process on behalf of the Gibson campaign.
For six days before any ballots were actually recounted, we sat in a closed-door room with recount backers to review “relevant” election materials with county staff, who patiently and professionally provided documentation and answered questions from Jones’ supporters.
What they were allowed to review included mail-ballot envelopes surrendered at polling places on Election Day, replaced with poll ballots cast on site. They examined hundreds of envelopes, scratching notes with comical gravitas, tut-tutting knowingly.
They tried to extend their paper proctoscopy to the entire county elections process, but county staff held firm: the only documents they’d see must be relevant to the D2 contest.
As I watched recount backers search for anything to hang their election denial hat on, it hit me: This inquisition wasn’t about the final vote.
Sure, they wanted to preserve the GOP’s 3-2 majority on the Board of Supervisors. But this bad-faith “recount” was performance art, third-rate drama focused on tearing down local democracy.
Triggering this epiphany was the court defeat of election denier Kari Lake, the Republican loser in the recent Arizona governor election. Lake’s claims of fraud and conspiracy — of the same genre pushed by our local GOP — were tossed by a judge due to lack of evidence.
Local recount proponents knew there was slim chance the recount would overturn Gibson’s 13-vote victory, so they were clearly playing for a probable court challenge.
In service to their own long-term political benefit — rather than victory in D2 — our local election deniers sought evidence of some kind of plot or misdeed to steal the D2 election.
I expect they’ll make a spectacle of their “findings” — a record of dubious legal value – to wage a noisy grievance campaign and try to solidify and further radicalize a shrinking voter base in SLO County, where Dems outnumber Reps 38 to 34 percent.
Left unchecked, they’ll muddy the reputation of SLO County’s elections staff, smear all who don’t abide the Big Lie. If MAGA candidates don’t win, elections are stolen, fraudulent, meaningless.
Recount supporters have the luxury of not having to prove anything. Simply making an accusation and creating a circus around it will suffice. Their aim is to delegitimize opposing candidates and their policies, seeking advantage in framing the political narrative for the next election cycle and beyond.
In this case, they apparently interpreted any hint that an election worker might have made a mistake — attached an incorrect sticker, inadvertently put a piece of paper in the wrong box — as an indication of “fraud,” “corruption,” “conspiracy.”
But in court, they’ll have to provide proof, not just dump their pile of scribbled notes. That’ll be a tough sell, as Lake found out in Arizona.
Theirs is an intricate con:
First, there would not have been thousands of surrendered ballots had the local GOP not campaigned strenuously for their flock to surrender them at the polls. This now appears a deliberate effort to gunk up vote counting, slow it down, provide a pretext to claim fraud.
Second, facts or not, the local GOP wants — needs — to play victim to some kind of “conspiracy” as they lurch from this election to the next and beyond. The truth doesn’t matter to them.
Third, the GOP majority on the Board of Supervisors set up the slow vote count, inviting complaints and claims of conspiracy. The majority twice refused to modernize this county’s voting apparatus, twice refused to upgrade systems and processes to accommodate the era of all-mail voting.
Now, recount proponents insinuate that a high volume of surrendered mail ballots is evidence in itself of voter fraud — exploiting a problem they and their allies on the board created.
Like Trump’s and Lake’s, theirs is an ongoing grift: raising money while constantly denigrating the integrity of elections until enough people believe it and stop participating.
This year, level-headed voters of SLO County rejected this nonsense in two supervisor districts specifically gerrymandered to continue far-right control over the Board of Supervisors.
Our collective political awakening — and a new board willing to defend local democracy — is reason for hope going into the New Year.
Tom Fulks is Bruce Gibson’s chief campaign strategist and an elected member of the SLO County Democratic Central Committee.
This story was originally published December 30, 2022 at 5:30 AM.