Incumbents fare well in El Dorado County
By Susan Wood and Kathryn Reed
While some longtime El Dorado County officeholders faced opposition for the first time in years, they all retained their seats.
The challenges had a lot more to do with political sparring on the West Slope and less about how well the incumbents were doing their job.
It was a slow start to voting at the Lake Tahoe Community College precinct. Photo/Lesia Witkowsky
The heads of the four offices that were challenged were not leading departments that received unfavorable reviews by employees in a recent county survey.
Retaining their seats are: Auditor-Controller Joe Harn, District Attorney Vern Pierson, Recorder-Clerk Bill Schultz and Treasurer C.L. Raffety.
“I’ve lived in the county for 40 years. I’ve been doing a pretty good job for 20 years. I’m not surprised I got re-elected,” Harn told Lake Tahoe News.
Schultz found himself in the position of working election night and being on the ballot.
“You know, I do everything the same each time. I don’t touch anything,” he said shortly after posting the first wave of results about 8pm when 70.24 percent of mostly absentees had been counted.
Absentee ballots are a notable distinction of county voter behavior year after year. Of the 106,944 registered voters in El Dorado, 72,251 cast their ballots by mail. The whopping 67.56 percent of registered voters can help some call or predict election results before all the precincts report in.
Schultz and staff have worked to increase the trend with new ideas and funding to support that effort. El Dorado County not only received a $1 million grant to fund a special website for military personnel to plug in their votes overseas. Now 13 other California counties are doing the same.
“We’ve heard nothing but good things about it,” the registrar said.
Call it tradition that El Dorado County voters may boast a better turnout than the dismal one predicted up and down California in this primary election – with some estimates as low as 25 percent.
“We’re doing a little better, and I hope it stays that way. We’re usually ahead of the pack on that. I was hoping for 40 percent, but I think I way overestimated,” Schultz said.
The incumbents were not reelected based on how they performed. They’ve all been exposed at some level for inexcusable management and financial practices. It really came down to name recognition and low voter turnout. They will all be under a 10X microscope this next term. Harn still runs the only department in the state without an approved cost plan. Just three weeks ago Shultz predicted a 65% voter turnout. The military grant was for multiple counties, which included our own funds for 200 military personnel. Rafferty was able to offset her campaign costs by being the only Tax Collector in the state that requires a resident to write out a check in her name versus the county. Hopefully something good will come out of this, or they will be replaced in the near future.