SD-15: Update On The Dennis Morris Write-In Campaign

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 know sometime around the middle of the month, as the write-in canvass occurs after all other votes have been tabulated.