SLO County’s clerk-recorder counts on herself

July 1, 2022

OPINION by CYNTHIA MUIR

It’s amazing that San Luis Obispo County’s appointed clerk recorder Elaina Cano, relatively unknown, who barely campaigned if at all, would have such a high percentage of the current election results.

As of the June 25 update, the clerk’s race shows Ms. Cano with 64.03% of the votes.  Compare that to Stew Jenkins, a local attorney with name recognition, a resident of SLO County for decades, and a candidate who walked door-to-door in every town in the county this past year, with only 15.42% of the vote. How is that even possible?

Is it a coincidence that Ventura and Kern counties have “appointed” clerk recorders also enjoying similar ratios of high percentages as SLO County’s Ms. Cano?

This all reminds me of an article by Katy Grimes, investigative journalist of the California Globe. In Nov. of 2020 she wrote, “How Many California Counties Use ‘Glitchy’ Dominion Voting System?”  She wrote about the Dominion programming “glitch” in Antrim Michigan that flipped 6,000 Trump votes to Biden votes. We have the same voting system here in this county.

Ms. Grimes included a list of unbelievably wide margin leads of Democrat incumbents in California who did not campaign or barely campaigned in the 2020 elections. Their challengers were out campaigning for months but didn’t even come close. The pattern is blatantly obvious.

Texas has banned the Dominion Voting System and other counties across the United States have experienced problems with it. In the Dekalb County, Georgia primary last month, commissioner candidate, Michelle Long Spears, was given machine counted results reflecting zero votes in several precincts, including her own.  After demanding a hand recount, she went from third place to first place in the primary.

During the hand recount they discovered over two thousand machine counted votes that didn’t have ballots to support those votes. Elections are being consistently overturned after hand counting the ballots.

The county clerk position is supposed to be non-partisan. However, it has become clear Ms. Cano has a bias. If you are a Democrat, she will promptly provide any election information requested. If you aren’t, she’ll make an excuse why she can’t respond to your request. When threatened with legal action, she will finally comply with the law. The California Elections Code, gives a shorter time period for responses during an election, yet Cano consistently goes beyond the allotted time frame. This is illegal behavior.

Questions: Why didn’t Elaina Cano disclose she was friends with Bruce Gibson’s wife when she was interviewing for her appointment?

How come Bruce Gibson was so against Stew Jenkins, an election law attorney with 40 plus years of experience in the clerk recorder’s position?

In a fair and transparent election, why was Cano’s husband delivering ballot boxes to the clerk’s office on election night?  I witnessed it myself, along with others.

When the person running the election is also a candidate who is counting the votes, it’s a classic case of the fox guarding the hen house.

We must demand a hand count of the clerk recorder’s race, and, if the numbers don’t match the reported results, the whole county should be hand counted.

Cynthia Muir has lived in SLO County for more than 50 years. She is the District 3 chair on the Republican Central Committee.