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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.


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Mexico has integrity in their voting system too, so what’s the problem here? Additionally we have Bruce Gibson championing the most qualified candidates and obviously the pubic agrees. We can’t assume that there are liars and thieves among us just because the big government wants to get bigger and provide more jobs, in fact they provide most of the jobs with great benefits and a growing stay home policy. Why would we want to change that, vote accordingly?


-12

Incredibly unfortunate that the SLO County Republican Party committee chair is a conspiracy theorist. I never remember the Republicans questioning elections until Donald Trump came onto the scene.


Kudos to County voters for overwhelmingly electing a professional to this position and not a publicity seeker such as Jenkins or an ideologue such as Baugh.


12

So, in essence you are proud of electing an under-achieving “professional”. Cano’s office finished the vote count in 54th place out of 58 counties. After discarding the deflection of blaming the voters in the Tribune for write-ins or blaming Newsome for unilaterally quadrupling the write-in volume (which the SLO office should have been prepared to count all 180k ballots sent out), the resultant root cause analysis will show Cano was unprepared and understaffed. She would have known about that in advance, but failed to share that with any news outlet that would print that info. The interventions will start with calling Tommy Gong to find out why Contra Costa County that has 3 times the population of SLO was able to finish counting ballots two weeks before Cano’s group. Then, someone should call all the top performing Clerk/Recorders for their “best practices” to incorporate into this fall’s SLO election. If these best practices aren’t employed then you are looking at the definition of insanity in November by doing the same thing and expecting a better result.

The optics of Cano’s husband touching a box of ballots shows a total lack of personal self awareness by both Cano and her husband. If it had been a close race this would have been an issue. The Dominion machine point is a distractive joke. If Dominion had glitches in 2020 they would have secretly patched their software or retired the machines just to make it harder for the pillow guy to make his case.


-5

I think this is hilarious. This whole election process is such a joke. Cano and the way her office gone about the count is filled with complete incompetence. We’re almost a month after election day and no official winners. Anyone who thinks this is acceptable is nuts. The only acceptable mail voting should be the process of “Absentee” ballots. This is a secure an easily verified way to vote unlike the now, f/u mail voting that is corrupt, costly, and unverified or accurate. It’s a cluster f…, and we’re seeing the results of it once again locally and across this nation.

How embarrassing for Jenkins. It has to be a blow to his ego. With all of his powerful local support, adds, and tons of money, it appears he’s finishing last. I find that also hilarious.


-24

More baseless conspiracy theory nonsense. Can we stop feeding the paranoia? We’re better than this. Cano won because she was the only one of the three candidates with any experience running elections. Thus far, no proof has emerged of any wrongdoing in the Clerk-Recorders office. If I were local Republicans, I’d put my emphasis and money on defeating Gibson in November. If you, you’ll lose control of the BOS.


5

Did you guys know that Elaina is the only local candidate endorsed by a socialist organization (Democratic Socialists of America SLO)?


It’s right there in their voter guide: https://slocialism.org/voter-guide/


She’s listed as “not a socialist but shares similar values”. I wonder what values she shares with the socialists! Typically in socialist countries nobody takes elections seriously as the outcome is always predetermined – hope she doesn’t share THAT value!


-1

Just more false innuendo about her character. She’s qualified and she won. Period.


-1

Let’s apply Occam’s Razor, which states “no more assumptions should be made than are necessary”, to the question of election fraud. The answers would be no one wants to steal an election or no one could steal an election. A very simple question.


Not so long ago, we had elections in this country and received the results of that election that night or within a day of the election. Now it takes weeks. This alone is cause for alarm and is probably the biggest reason for the growing distrust in our election systems. Ballot counting machines are supposed to making ballot counting faster.


I have many issues with computerized ballot counting machines. The biggest problem in my opinion is that they are a computer. Computers are programmed by people. Once the computer program is written, the code is compiled into a language the computer understands and loaded into the computer. The actual program can not be read once it is in the computer. It would be very easy to write code into the computer to do all kinds of crazy things. Let’s not forget that these machines are also hooked to the internet and could be controlled from outside the area. The only way to check the accuracy of a machine is with a hand count. Running multiple samples through a machine would probably not show any discrepancies, especially if the programmer only triggers the fraud at certain dates, times and vote tallies.


If the ballot counting machines are trustworthy, why are so many people against a hand count to verify the results?


20

Assessing the accuracy of machine counted ballots isn’t that difficult and doesn’t require counting all ballots by hand. Random sample batches of already tabulated ballots, numbering somewhere between 600 and 3000, would be machine counted a second time to determine the results for each specific batch. Then, those same batches would be carefully, methodically, accurately counted by hand by teams of three people with a least two observers. If the results of the second machine tabulation for each batch don’t exactly match the original machine count and the precise hand count, you know the machine count is flawed. A proper sampling of random batches of sufficient number ballots would be ”tested” in this way to provide a statistically significant result for the entire lot of all lawfully cast ballots. This procedure should be S.O.P. after all elections to assess the reliability and accuracy of machine tabulated ballots. If the machines prove to be inaccurate & inconsistent, then all ballots must undergo a full hand count before the election can be certified.


45

The reason most of the County distrusts Cal Coast News and doesn’t consider it a source of real news is because they happily publish opinion pieces like this. It’s not amazing that the smart people in this County realize that the County Clerk Recorder position is responsible for much more than just elections, and that Stew Jenkins has no relevant experience for any of that (and very little for the elections piece). It is reassuring that Jenkins, after having raised the most money of all three candidates, wasn’t able to buy this election. What is also telling, and conspicuously absent from Muir’s piece, is that Jenkins also did far worse than the third candidate, Baugh, who is even less qualified than Jenkins.


-9

What a massive pile of lies. This is the Retrumpqklans standard sedition procedure from now on, anytime you don’t like the outcome of an election, say you have lots of evidence but never produce a shred, just “theories”. Oh, and don’t forget to spew lots of lies even before the election so you can say “see I told you”.


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