Voters hadn’t even started casting ballots in the November 2020 election when President Donald Trump first began questioning the legitimacy of mail-in ballots and the elections system as a whole, and now allegations of election fraud and calls for recounts are spreading among those on the right throughout the nation and in Santa Barbara County. But 5th District Supervisor Steve Lavagnino, a former Republican recently turned Independent and self-described centrist, isn’t having it.
“I’m just trying to combat all of the crazy talk that’s out there,” Lavagnino told the Sun.
In a post Lavagnino shared to his personal Facebook page on Nov. 5, he addressed some of the many questions he’s received and dispelled rumors he’s heard about this year’s election and the potential for fraud. With the prevalence of misinformation online and a huge voter turnout this year, Lavagnino said it’s not surprising that there’s so much confusion about and mistrust in the system.
Roughly 84 percent of Santa Barbara County’s registered voters cast 197,463, ballots in this year’s election, according to unofficial results posted online by the Santa Barbara County Registrar of Voters. Roughly 77 percent of those ballots arrived through the mail or via drop boxes.
That’s a huge turnout for Santa Barbara County, Lavagnino said, and an unprecedented number of vote-by-mail ballots. So the counting process is naturally taking a little longer than usual, he said, and a lot of people who don’t normally pay much attention to the elections process are just now getting involved for the first time and have legitimate questions about the process.
In the last several days, Lavagnino said he’s fielded questions about everything from how national media outlets go about calling races before all the votes have been counted, why votes are still being counted, and Santa Barbara County’s mail-in-ballot tracker, to allegations of outright fraud.
“It is quite possible that your vote has not been counted YET,” Lavagnino wrote on Facebook. “That all depends when you dropped off your ballot. Due to the overwhelming voter turnout there are still thousands of uncounted ballots. The count is still going on and will continue until every vote is counted.”
“This is not fraud—,” he added later, “this is how the election system works.”
Still, calls for recounts and allegations of voter fraud raged on locally after Election Day. Some members of the Santa Barbara County Republican Party are alleging that a polling location at Isla Vista Community Center allowed electioneering, the dissemination of information advocating for or against any candidate or measure on a ballot, on Election Day. The Registrar of Voters denied those claims in a story published by the Santa Barbara News-Press.
Petitions to recount the votes nationwide are circulating in local conservative Facebook groups, and on Nov. 8, local Trump supporters hosted rallies and drives in protest of the election results from Santa Maria to Paso Robles.
But to Lavagnino, the results of the election—both locally and nationally—weren’t shocking in the slightest. Trump won by razor thin margins in 2016, Lavagnino said, and now he’s losing in about the same way. Plus, he said, Republicans had a great night on Nov. 3. Despite the presidential loss, Republicans held onto a number of key seats in the U.S. House and Senate and won some important local races—even in California.
To him, that illustrates that people want some sort of return to nonpartisan efforts in government, outfitted with less dramatic rhetoric and more actual action.
“Since I am what I consider a centrist and pragmatist,” he said, “I thought you could actually categorize this election as one that the middle won.”
This article appears in Nov 12-19, 2020.
