2016 Postmortem

But he came in after a screwed up election.

A supervisor before he was elected was elected by a fluke. There had been a woman supervisor for decades and no one expected her to retire any time soon. But in 1984 hours before the close of filing she announced she was retiring. The only candidate who got the news soon enough to file was her son who had been working in the office for years. Of course he won - the position then was not controversial and people assumed he had the knowledge to run the elections because his experience in the office as a worker.

The first election he ran was a disaster. The old lever machines had not been properly set up, ballots were not aligned with the levers and voters were not sure they voted for their selected candidates. That election ended up being challenged in court and the state supreme court decision that elections could not be re-held was a precedent in the 2000 election.

Meanwhile, Ion Sancho took courses in election machine management and became certified in their use and that was part of his platform when he ran for supervisor of elections in 1988. He introduced paper ballots with optical scanners to our county and programmed the scanners to kick back any flawed ballots. Since the voters feed their ballots into the scanners themselves, that allows the election officials to give the voters a chance to correct any problems or to submit a fresh ballot.

Since then our county has had no issues with the elections. In 2000 once the recount was ordered it took 45 minutes to recount the "good" ballots with no change in the totals. The under 200 "flawed" ballots were released in a PDF file (that I still have in my archives from those days) so that they could be examined by the public. Most had multiple votes for the same office, extraneous marks, and other defects that not only made them not able to get through the scanner but also made it impossible to determine the will of the voter who cast that ballot.

Sancho has also participated in efforts to improve voting reliability - and has been censured by the Republican Party and the manufacturers of voting machines for his work.

He will be missed now that he is retiring. I can only hope that the man who he endorsed and who has worked with him for many years will be as good as Sancho was in office!