Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s race stands at a difference of less than 7,000 votes

SANTA BARBARA COUNTY, Calif. - Going for his fourth term in office, Sheriff Bill Brown has had a solid opponent in the current election and the final results are still days away.

Brown had a lead of 14 percentage points over challenger Lt. Juan Camarena after the first round of ballot counting on election night.

In real numbers, it is less than 7,000 votes.

The Elections Office is currently counting the remaining ballots and it will first release an estimate of how many still need to be verified and tallied. To do that, the staff is picking up ballots dropped off on Tuesday from the U.S. Post Office.

At 8 p.m. Tuesday evening, when the polls closed, the white ballot drop-off boxes were secured by the county and locked. The ballots inside were collected and brought to the Elections Office.

As of 11:30 a.m. Wednesday, there were 348 uncounted, 354 provisional, and 23,633 ballots from polls and boxes. Combined with the 49,288 ballots counted Tuesday, that comes to 73,622 or 31.3%.

Those numbers will change with the remaining mailed ballots arriving under the provisions of the state law for elections and post-marked by the deadline.

An updated results summary will be released at 5 p.m. on June 14, along with the number of ballots remaining at that time.

Voter James Hurst was surprised at the Sheriff's race results. "No I didn't figure it would be that close.  I thought Sheriff Brown would get more votes than that."

Nearby the main Post Office Marck Aguila said, "It does surprise me. I figured it would be lopsided one way ."

The voter runout currently shows about 69 percent of the eligible voters did not cast a ballot. Voter Brad Newton said, "I am hyper disappointed in only 20 percent of the voting population voted."

This was called one of the easiest elections to vote in with all the options. Marck Aguilar agreed saying, " it doesn't take that much to vote and even if it does you should still be putting a little effort into it."

One voter said he wants to see more voters in each election not just for the results but the intent.

Brad Newton said you would get "a more accurate representation of what the true voting population would  be  like.  Typically  what happens is the people who do vote are the ones who are motivated to prove a point."  

For more information go to: SBCVote.com