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In many elections, voters will cast a ballot selecting candidates at the top of the ticket but skip voting on “down-ballot” races—resulting in what election officials call “undervotes.” In the Nov. 5 election, a number of San Benito County races had more undervotes tallied than the margin between the top two choices, which means the undervotes may have determined the outcomes of those races.
The races with more undervotes than the margin of victory included Hollister’s District 4 City Council seat, both of San Juan Bautista’s City Council seats, Hollister’s Area 4 School District, plus Measure X, which proposed the sale of Hazel Hawkins Memorial Hospital.
Cheryl Rios won Hollister’s Area 4 School District by only 48 votes, but more than 800 people did not vote in that specific race. For Measure X, which passed by about 700 votes, more than 1,500 people chose not to vote on it.
San Benito County Clerk and Registrar of Voters Francisco Diaz said there is no way to say for sure if any of the races’ outcomes would have changed if there had been less undervoting.
“I think overall for more local districts, you tend to see larger percentages of undervotes,” Diaz said. “But ultimately we still don’t know how those individuals would have voted.”
According to Diaz, undervoting is primarily an issue about reaching voters.
“Overall the candidates didn’t reach those particular voters,” Diaz said. “A lot of the time we tend to focus on highly engaged voters, which is anywhere from 20%-25%. There is a large percentage of voters who are not highly engaged, and a lot of the times we don’t reach them, whether it be the candidates or the elections office itself.”
Diaz said undervoting in San Benito County is not something the registrar of voters is concerned about.
“I don’t see it as an issue,” he said. “Ultimately I see perhaps that the voters did not have the opportunity either to vet both candidates or they didn’t make up their mind at that point in time and they purposefully chose not to vote for that contest.”
Diaz said undervoting is especially likely with elections for propositions or bond measures, whose language can be hard for people to understand.
“Some of these measures tend to be complex or tend to be written in a legal format,” he said, “and people sometimes struggle understanding them.”
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