With a hundred percent of the county precincts reporting after midnight on Super Tuesday, unofficial results show two of the supervisor races appear decided. Jacob Brown was only 23 votes behind incumbent Maureen Mulheren in the second district supervisor race, while Bernie Norvell took more than 81.% of the vote in the fourth district race against Georgina Avila Gorman. Madeline Cline came in with close to 60% of the vote in the four-way race for first district supervisor, with Adam Gaska trailing at just over 23%. Supervisor seats are non-partisan, but deep-blue Mendocino County is guaranteed two Republicans on the Board of Supervisors. Almost four times as many voters cast ballots for Democratic presidential candidates as Republicans.
In the Second Assembly District race, Republican Michael Greer was the highest local vote getter, with almost 27% of the vote. Supervisor Ted Williams came in second, with over 21%, though in Humboldt County, he had 3% in the first results. Statewide, Chris Rogers was just ahead of Rusty Hicks and behind Greer.
The unofficial county tally reports a 14% turnout. Primary elections typically don’t draw a huge crowd. But a variety of ballot blunders had many of the voters who did make it to the polls on edge. All the county’s registered voters received Republican ballots for the Antoni Lane precinct in the first supervisorial district early last month. Those ballots were replaced at the vendor’s expense. Then it came to light that voter rolls had not been updated following the 2021 redistricting. This led to an as-yet unrevealed number of voters receiving another round of ballots for the proper district.
Voters expressed a wide range in their levels of confidence that their ballots would be counted, with many expressing frustration at the difficulty they had in voting this time around.
