Speculation fills informational void in write-in contest for 32nd Assembly District
Standings in the race for California’s 32nd Assembly District seat remained hidden by a procedural lag Wednesday, with no results yet available for any of the four candidates running to succeed the person whose name appeared alone on the ballot but who no longer wants the job.
As of early evening, only incumbent Vince Fong was reported to have received any votes. But because he is focused instead on winning California’s 20th Congressional District seat, and said he doesn’t care to return to the Assembly, the 17,751 votes he has earned are almost irrelevant.
An update on how many write-in votes each of the other candidates has received isn’t expected to be released until Friday, a spokesman for the Kern County Elections Department said by email Wednesday afternoon.
That left Fong’s would-be successors to wait and hope.
The fellow Bakersfield Republican he endorsed for the Assembly seat, Ward 3 Bakersfield City Councilman Ken Weir, sounded the softest note of impatience, saying by email that “although there are lots of write-in votes, (county) Elections for some reason hasn’t given out a count.”
But he also wrote with optimism, saying he heard while campaigning that voters were “all supportive of ‘Vince Fong for Congress and Ken Weir for Assembly.’”
If Fong gets elected to serve out the remainder of the 20th Congressional District term left vacant by his mentor, former Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Bakersfield, and if Weir places first or second in the Assembly race, then the inevitable two-candidate runoff in the November general election “makes my campaign next fall a bit easier!”
Another Bakersfield Republican in the race, small businessman Ian David Smith, said by email Wednesday he was in no rush because “where voting is concerned, accuracy is more important than expedience.”
Having expected the vote counting to take several weeks, Smith offered his thanks to election officials and poll workers.
“Sifting tens of thousands of ballots, and hand counting write-in votes and verifying signatures, doesn’t sound like easy work,” he wrote.
The only other Bakersfield Republican in the Assembly race, Tom Willis, owner and operator of San Joaquin Veterinary Hospital, did not respond to a request for comment.
Three Rivers resident David Duane Wood, a retired clinical psychologist and the contest’s only Democrat, said by email the outcome of the race is hard to guess at this point because Fong was leading the race for the 20th Congressional District on Wednesday, and that he may have a strong chance to win the special election later this month to decide who will serve out McCarthy’s term.
Wood wondered, if Fong gets removed from the ballot for the 32nd Assembly race come November, what might happen with the top two finishers in Tuesday’s primary being write-in candidates. If that all comes to pass, he reasoned, the three Republicans might have missed out on the votes Fong drew, possibly giving Wood a better chance to become a finalist.
“Watching and waiting to see vote tallies for CA 32 write-in candidates just became perhaps a whole lot more interesting!” he wrote.
The district covers parts of Kern, Kings and Tulare counties.