We’re waiting for results in the SD-15 race.  Here is the Secretary of State’s webpage for the race. Here’s the first batch:

Jim Fitzgerald 5606 5.8%

Mark Hinkle 1874 2.0%

John Laird 39857 41.5%

Sam Blakeslee 48617 50.7%

UPDATE by Robert: Returns are slowly being updated by the five counties. Here’s the latest, as of 10:16 pm:

Jim Fitzgerald 7277 5.6%

Mark Hinkle 2811 2.1%

John Laird 56653 43.2%

Sam Blakeslee 64352 49.1%

UPDATE by Brian: As of 12:07 AM, with 100% of precincts reporting:

Jim Fitzgerald 8014 5.1%

Mark Hinkle 3162 2.0%

John Laird 69649 44.1%

Sam Blakeslee 77107 48.8%

Sam Blakeslee will be the next Senator in SD-15.  Arnold’s gamesmanship worked like a charm.  By moving this election away from a real election date, he got what he wanted.  From the look of these numbers, I think we have a great shot of winning this election if it was held concurrently with the general in November.  I hope he’s going to pay the extra money that it took to win this seat for Blakeslee out of his own pocket.  

Today’s the day.  Well, not really today so much as the last few weeks have culminated with today.  Though it doesn’t really feel like an election day, today is the official election day along the central coast in the skirmish to replace St. Abel Maldonado since he was called up appointed to be the Lt. Governor.

Residents from Santa Clara County to Santa Barbara County — including Saratoga, Los Gatos, Almaden Valley and Morgan Hill — are choosing a replacement for former state Sen. Abel Maldonado, who was appointed lieutenant governor earlier this year.

Though the winner of ?today’s Senate race could help shape the outcome of the state’s muddled budget negotiations, the oddly-timed summer election is not likely to draw a high turnout.(SJ Merc)

I cannot stress enough the importance of electing John to the Senate. Beyond the numbers game in the Senate, which is plainly critical, John is the right person for the job.  He has the experience that we need, his work with the budget in the Assembly was superb.  And he is the kind of person, honest and hard-working that the legislature needs more of.  

If you know anybody in the district (PDF), please call them to make sure they have voted. If you are near the district, stop in to one of the campaign offices to help out.  And, you can always watch the twitter feed.

I really can’t be effusive enough about my respect and admiration for John Laird.  So, I was a bit disappointed to see Sam Blakeslee top the first round of voting.  And he is frightfully close to the magic 50%. Right now he’s sitting on 49.7% of the vote with all precincts reporting.  

Assuming that holds up we will have a run-off. With exactly the same candidates. Yes, you read that right. Because in special elections, every party leader goes to the general election, we’ll be seeing the same four candidates in the race. And turnout will be exceedingly low again.

So, in the next three months, we’ll need to work harder to claw back those 10,000 votes and turn out our voters.  Surely if we would consolidate this election with the general election, like it should be, we would be in a solid position come November.  However, Arnold chose to waste the money for another special election, so we will need to work ever harder to push John Laird over the top.

Secretary Bowen tweets:

Abel Maldonado sworn in today as Lt Gov, meaning SD15 needs a special election. And Governor just proclaimed it: 6/22 primary, 8/17 general.

That means: less than four months to build a campaign that can prevail in a very winnable special election with a not insignificant Democratic registration advantage.

After running as a write-in candidate on the Democratic ballot line in June, Abel Maldonado is now buying spots on Democratic slate mailers, even though he is facing only token opposition from independent Jim Fitzgerald.  This guy REALLY doesn’t want to self-identify as a Republican.

Independent state senate candidate Jim Fitzgerald accused incumbent Sen. Abel Maldonado (R-Santa Maria) of wanting to have it both ways, running as a Republican but appearing on slate mailers for Democratic and independent voters.

“I wonder if John McCain would have let him speak at the RNC if he knew that Abel would be paying for flyers that tell voters to vote for Barack Obama,” said Fitzgerald, a retired UPS worker who is self-financing his campaign, in a press release. “I wonder if the Republican Party would have contributed over $50,000 to Abel’s campaign if they knew that he was going to pay $12,000 to appear on literature that promotes the Democratic ticket.”

This is another reason why Don Perata’s bullying of Democrats to keep them out of the race against Maldonado was such a failure.  He wouldn’t have an opportunity to buy his way onto these slate mailers if there was a Democratic candidate.  And so he gets to position himself as an independent-minded reformer instead of the down-the-line Yacht Party Republican he is, for the most part.  This enhances Maldonado’s public image at precisely the time when he is likely to run for statewide office (I know he lost the primary for the Controller’s race in 2006, and afterward claimed that he’ll never run for office again, but I don’t buy it).  He spoke at the RNC this year, a clear sign that the party views him as a rising star.  The proper move for opposing parties is to try and cripple the other side’s rising star.  You don’t enable them when they can come back and beat you years later.

Thanks a lot, Don Perata, don’t forget to pick up your parting gift in a month…

Despite Don Perata’s extreme efforts to keep Democrats off the ballot to face his BFF Abel Maldonado in a plurality-Democratic district, Jim Fitzgerald has succeeded in getting enough petitions to mount a challenge on the November ballot.  This is from his press release:

Independent Candidate, Jim Fitzgerald, is building support to unseat Abel Maldonado on November’s Ballot.

“I am running for office to bring independent thinking and change to Sacramento.   Our state is still operating without an approved budget.  The price of gas is out of control.  Schools should not pay the price for wasteful government spending.  These are just a few of the issues that are important to me and the citizens of our district.”   (Independent Candidate Jim Fitzgerald)

Fitzgerald is not a career politician beholden to any party. He is an ordinary citizen who wants to breakup the gridlock in the State Senate divided on party lines.

Fitzgerald has worked for UPS for over 30 years ending his career as an account manager. He had personal dealings daily with small businesses throughout the Central Coast.  Working from the ground floor up, he knows what it is like to work long days in order to support a family.  Fitzgerald is not a professional politician but rather a hard working individual who will give back to the very people he is supposed to be representing.

Now, Fitzgerald is an independent candidate, not a Democrat.  But his issue positions certainly lean Democratic.  His main proposal on his website concerns modernizing the government fleet to make every state-issued car a hybrid or electric vehicle.

This is obviously longer than a longshot, but I appreciate Fitzgerald’s efforts if only to force Don Perata to make good on his word to walk precincts for his good buddy Abel in the fall.  That’ll be a good use of time for the guy who just got $250,000 for his legal defense fund from the CDP.

Dennis Morris didn’t make the 3896 magic number to get on the general election ballot the old-fashioned write-in way. However, he thinks he has a plan to get on the ballot notwithstanding the lack of the necessary write-ins:

Pismo Beach attorney Dennis Morris believes he’s found a way to still get on tne November ballot as a Democratic opponent for 15th District State Senator Abel Maldonado (R-Santa Maria).

Morris, who previously attempted to get onto the ballot through a write-in vote in the June 3 primary, said he’s found a provision of elections law that may get him there.

Section 8605(c) of the California Elections Code allows a write-in candidate’s name to be placed on the general election ballot if a party’s central committee puts the write-in candidate there to fill a vacancy, and if the candidate appeared as a write-in on the primary ballot, as Morris did.(PolitickerCA 7/1/08)

Bascially, Morris thinks that if he gets all five central committees to appoint him as the candidate, then he has to be put on the ballot.  There is some contrary caselaw, but it seems to run contrary to the state constitution:

“A political party that participated in a primary election shall not be denied the ability to place on the general election ballot the candidate who received, at the primary election, the highest vote among that party’s candidates.”

California Constitution, Article II, Section 5(b).

Stay tuned, this might not be over yet…

Monterey County still hasn’t yet finished its final tally of votes from the June primary election, but from the returns it has so far, and the results from the other four counties in SD-15, the Monterey Herald is reporting that Dennis Morris’ write-in campaign will fall short of the 3,689 votes needed to qualify for the November ballot as the Democratic nominee.

Abel Maldonado, the Republican incumbent, used a loophole in state law to file as a write-in candidate to block Morris and appears to have been successful in doing so, although he didn’t get enough votes to win the Democratic nomination either:

A check by The Herald on Tuesday showed the following county-by-county tallies in the write-in race: San Luis Obispo County, Morris, 1,239-Maldonado, 485; Santa Cruz County, Morris, 188-Maldonado, 117; and Santa Barbara County, Morris, 51-Maldonado, 54…

Monterey County elections chief Linda Tulett said her office is about halfway done processing ballots with possible write-in votes. But many of them don’t have votes for valid write-in candidates, she said, so the total count will be well below the 1,200 raw ballots.

“It’s very difficult for a write-in candidate to get on the next ballot,” she said.

Maldonado’s sleazy aide Brandon Gesicki is already claiming victory, though Morris is refusing to concede. But the numbers do not look good for Morris. Gesicki claims that in Santa Clara County Maldonado has a 53-37 lead, and even if that isn’t accurate, it is clear that there aren’t enough write-in votes to even potentially give Morris a victory.

The author of this failure, Don Perata, is leaving his leadership post on August 21, which cannot come quickly enough. But Democrats need to remember the lesson. It is unconscionable to leave a seat uncontested, especially a seat where there’s a Democratic registration majority, especially when it is one of the keys to getting a 2/3 majority in the legislature.

Dems have been playing “let’s make a deal” with Republicans for a long time now, and hopefully they’re starting to realize how those deals work: Republicans demand, and Dems give in. If Democrats are to advance their agenda and finally solve this ongoing budget crisis they will need a 2/3 majority to do it. Democrats need to make that a priority, and never again repeat the failure to draft a candidate that we saw in SD-15.

Dennis Morris did a great job, stepping up when nobody else – myself included – would. But he has also shown the difficulty of a write-in campaign, and reminded us that Democrats need to be smarter about how they campaign in California.

The campaign liaison to us blogger folks is providing us with constant updates about the write-in campaign of Dennis Morris, the legal scholar who launched a last-minute effort to step into the breach and get on the ballot to face Abel Maldonado in November in the 15th Senate District.  San Luis Obispo County, where the effort originated, now reports 2,385 write-in votes, an addition of 396 since the count on election night.  As far as the other counties, we have:

Santa Barbara: 413 write-in votes

Santa Cruz County 897 write-in votes

Which brings us to 3,701 votes, with 3,689 needed for passage.  Now, Monterey and Santa Clara Counties have not released their write-in totals, but Frank Russo is reporting that there were 1,182 write-in votes in Monterey County.  That brings us to 4,883.  And that’s without Santa Clara County:

And we don’t have any figures from Santa Clara County that supplied 24.4% of the Democratic votes in this district the last time the seat was contested in 2004. If Santa Clara County voters follow the rule of thumb of the other counties, there should be at least another thousand or more write-ins.

And in each of these counties there are a number of ballots not included in the initial election night sweep-vote-by-mail ballots or absentee ballots as they used to be called that were either dropped off at the polling place on election day or arrived in the mail at the registrar’s office on election day and were not opened until later. Also provisional ballots. These are thousands of ballots that will undoubtedly contain many more write-ins. In fact, Morris’ write in campaign got rolling-as much as it did-late. So a higher percentage of late voters would have been aware of it.

The caveat is that we don’t know anything about what these write-in votes say on them.  They could have Dennis Morris’ name.  They could have Abel Maldonado’s name, considering he petitioned at the last minute to file as a write-in candidate in the Democratic primary.  And they could have Mickey Mouse’s name.  We have no idea at this point.

Still, if all the votes come in at roughly the same level as they had, there’s at least theoretically a decent cushion of votes for Morris to get to the 3,689 needed.  That said, it’s not at all safe, and there’s nothing we can do but wait and see.  We’ll probably now sometime around the middle of the month, as the write-in canvass occurs after all other votes have been tabulated.

And Monterey and Santa Clara Counties have yet to report at all.  There’s a half-decent chance he’s going to make it.  And that would be just an incredible story.  A guy gets his ballot, sees no Democrat on it, decides to do something about it, and makes it on the ballot as a write-in?  To quote Joe Biden, “That’s a storybook, man.”

…as long as we’re doing Central Valley Senate races, I should mention that the Denham recall failed.  And Denham was all gloat-y about it.  Congratulations, you beat an unfunded recall.  What a big man you are.