Votes to be counted by Wednesday - Marin IJ 11/17/06 by Richard Holstead

Votes to be counted by Wednesday
Richard Halstead
Article Launched:11/17/2006 11:30:01 PM PST

Marin Registrar of Voters Elaine Ginnold expects all the Marin votes cast in the Nov. 7 election to be counted by Wednesday, the day before Thanksgiving.
The final vote counts will be announced then but the election won't be certified until Dec. 1 - after county election workers complete a manual recount of 3 percent of the precinct votes, Ginnold said. She said the county is re-counting 3 percent of the votes even though the law requires only 1 percent.

"We're going beyond because we want to build confidence," Ginnold said.

The registrar's office released the results of another 16,409 absentee ballots Friday. Ginnold said there are another 3,000 absentee and 2,900 provisional ballots still to be counted.

The newly counted ballots stretched Mark Trotter's lead over incumbent board member George Stratigos in the race for the third seat on the Sausalito Marin City School District board. Trotter now has a 59-vote lead over Stratigos. When additional ballots were counted last week, Stratigos had closed the gap to 34 votes.

The newly-counted Marin ballots added 9,321 votes in favor of Measure R and 6,539 votes opposing it. The initiative would have raised Marin and Sonoma counties' sales tax one-fourth of a cent to create a rail line from Cloverdale to Larkspur.
Despite the number of uncounted ballots, backers of Measure R have given up hope of eking out a victory. It needed 66.7 percent of the vote to pass but fell short with 65 percent.

Sonoma County election officials said they also expect to release final vote totals on Wednesday. Sonoma County, which has not provided updates, is in the process of counting more than 23,000 absentee ballots and an unknown number of provisional ballots.