Contact: Mark Church, Chief Elections Officer & Assessor-County Clerk-Recorder
Alternate: Jim Irizarry, Asst. Chief Elections Officer & Asst. Assessor-County Clerk-Recorder
(Redwood City, CA) The San Mateo County Registration & Elections Division has completed the voter-requested recount of the contest for U.S. Representative, 16th District for the March 5, 2024 Presidential Primary Election. The recount results for San Mateo County show Evan Low gaining one vote compared to the original tally, with no change for Joe Simitian. The original results had Joe Simitian and Evan Low tied for second place.
The recount was conducted by machine tally and was open to the public. All ballots in the 16th Congressional District were rescanned. After rescanning all ballots, the recounted results remained the same as the certified results.
Mark Church, Chief Elections Officer, stated, “We are pleased that the machine recount showed that all ballots cast in the March 5, Presidential Primary Election were reported accurately and were an exact match to the certified results posted in the Statement of the Vote to the Secretary of State on April 4, 2024.”
As is permitted by EC §15360, the requestor of the recount asked to review relevant materials including ballot envelopes that were not counted due to late arrival, signature mismatch, or missing signatures. The review process was also open to the public, and of the 586 ballot envelopes reviewed, 28 were challenged by the requestor.
Of those 28 challenged ballots, 12 related to signature verification and 16 related to postmark issues. The challenged ballot process resulted in 21 challenges that were rejected and 7 were accepted. The accepted challenged ballots have been added to the recount totals and will be posted on our website at https://smcacre.gov/elections/current-recount-status.
In total, the Registration & Elections Division scanned and tallied 40,077 ballots for the 16th Congressional District.
The 16th Congressional District includes portions of San Mateo and Santa Clara County.
More information on the San Mateo County Registration & Elections Division can be found on our website at: smcvote.gov. For more information, please call or text 650.312.5222, visit www.smcacre.gov, or follow us on Twitter and Instagram @smcvote.