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Health & Fitness

The Great Game

November 5, 2013 was Election Day in our county. It was an “off cycle” election, meaning that there were no state or national issues or offices on the ballot. Off cycle elections tend to get very low voter turnout. So low that in some places, there is a push to eliminate them altogether.

Here in Redwood City, and in the surrounding communities, there were school board races, city council races, and bond issues. Given the fact that these are offices and issues that most directly affect a community’s daily life, it would seem that voters would turn out to choose who will make decisions that affect them so closely. But only a small fraction of the voters sees it that way.

I was on the ballot for a seat on the Sequoia Union High School District Board (SUHSD). This board has five trustees, with two seats up for election this year and three seats up in two years (2015). Based on past election history and conversations with the election office, my campaign team anticipated a 25% turnout rate for the high school district. Our strategy involved working through the numbers, and yet I lost the election on less than 500 votes, less than 1%, garnering 15,096 votes against incumbent Chris Thomsen with 15,546 votes.  What we didn’t realize is, while a school bond will get out the votes in Menlo Park, a city council election doesn’t bring out voters in Redwood City.

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The SUHSD board controls over $100M in taxpayer money – the bulk of which comes from property taxes that do not go to Sacramento, but instead stay right here in San Mateo County. Many taxpayers, however, do not see the direct connection between their vote and how their money gets used. There is not a lot of deep analysis in the local press on school issues at the local level and most people assume no news is good news. I will be going into this in more detail over the next few months, because while our district does have consistent success with specific groups of students, there are other areas that the board needs to be held accountable for by the public.

But today I want to focus on voting. Though I actually won based on the vote at the polls, I lost on the vote-by-mail. Losing as I did on such a close margin means that there were people who chose not to vote. And that choice actually mattered to the election outcome.

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This county makes it incredibly easy to vote with the vote-by-mail program. The ballots are sent out one month in advance of an election, and voters tend to turn the ballot around in the first week or two prior to all the campaign literature hitting mailboxes, newspapers weighing in, or the unfolding of campaign events that might provide voters with further information about the candidates or issues. So, it’s highly possible that my loss was due to early-vote-by-mail voters as much as it was due to the few hundred people who didn’t understand that voting at the local level actually matters more to their everyday lives than a vote in a presidential election.

In the end, I am proud of our achievement – getting within spitting distance of unseating a first-term incumbent without being a well-known name is impressive by any measure. I deeply appreciate the effort that my committee, volunteers, and supporters put into helping me run an incredibly well-coordinated effort, as demonstrated by the total number of people who did vote for me.

I still find myself wishing more voters had come out to decide the election of the high school district board. I am not feeling too sorry for myself, though. As the mother of two athletes, I have spent a lot of time watching my daughter swim competitively and my son run plays as a member of the two-time Ocean Division champion Woodside High School Frosh/Soph Football team. So, I understand that this is a competition, and a loss today may only set one up for a win tomorrow.  Here’s looking to 2015.





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