Registrar's Goal: Certify Banning Election and Finalize Results by Nov. 18

The Banning Unified School District board of trustees election is finished, but certifying and finalizing the results will take more than a week, a registrar's official said Wednesday.

"Semi-final official results" reported late Tuesday remained unchanged Wednesday afternoon.

With seven candidates vying for three seats on the five-seat board, the uncertified results were:

Larry Ellis                    2,180 votes

Ray Curtis                   1,978 votes

Alejandro Cassadas    1,432 votes

Deborah Dukes           1,404 votes

David Vanden Heuvel     877 votes

Maxine Israel                  647 votes

Alfredo Andrade             370 votes

The registrar reported 8,888 total votes counted in the election, but did not report a total number of ballots counted.

Each school board election ballot instructed "Vote for no more than Three," according to the registrar.

According to uncertified results, the battle for third place in the race was determined by 28 votes - less than one-third of 1 percent of the total 8,888 votes counted.

Dukes said Wednesday she was waiting for "the final count" to be announced.

"Our goal is to certify the election and have final results by Nov. 18," Assistant Registrar of Voters Rebecca Spencer said in a phone interview Wednesday.

Certification requires several steps, Spencer said.

"First we have to work on vote-by-mail ballots," she said. "We had 4,000 county-wide dropped off at voting places yesterday."

Vote-by-mail ballots must be signature-checked, removed from envelopes, and counted, Spencer said.

Next is a roster audit, comparing the number of voter signatures at individual polling places with the number of ballots cast at individual polling places.

Provisional ballots - for voters who were not on rosters at individual polling locations - must also be checked to ascertain the voters who used provisional ballots were eligible, Spencer said.

A 1 percent manual tally of the 56 precincts in the school board election must also be performed.

And a 100 percent manual tally of all electronic ballots is required, Spencer said. There was one electronic voting machine at each of seven polling locations for the Banning Unified School District board election, she said.

The number of ballots cast will be available once the election is certified and results are finalized, Spencer said.