The 2024 results must still be signed off by the County Board of Supervisors and the California Secretary of State, and recount requests can still be submitted through 5 p.m. Dec. 8. (A recount cost is the requestor’s responsibility.)

Here are some at-a-glance stats from the 2024 certified results:

• A total of 959,098 ballots were processed and counted with 69.89% of eligible Riverside County voters turning out.
• Riverside County was evenly split on its choice for president. Republican Donald Trump received 463,677 votes, or 49.30%, while Democrat Kamala D. Harris garnered 451,782 votes, or 48.04%. Of the other candidates on the ballot, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (AIP) received the most votes in Riverside County with 11,160, or 1.19%.
• Though former Major League Baseball star Steve Garvey (R) lost his U.S. Senate bid to Democrat Adam Schiff in the statewide contest, the ex-first baseman narrowly beat the veteran politician in Riverside County by just over 3 percentage points.
• In the six U.S. House races in Riverside County, county voters chose a Republican over a Democrat in four of the contests.
• Likewise, in Riverside County’s six state Assembly races, voters chose a Republican in four of the contests.
• In the two state Senate races, it was a different story: Riverside County voters chose Democrats.

See Riverside County’s full Nov. 5, 2024, Presidential General Election results here.

Riverside County’s 2024 Presidential General Election results were not so different from the 2020 final tallies, though the race for the White House shows a contrast:

• A total of 1,016,896 ballots were processed and counted in 2020, with 81.80% of eligible Riverside County voters turning out.
• When Joe Biden ran against Trump four years ago, Biden garnered 528,340 votes in Riverside County compared to Trump’s 449,144.
• In 2020, there were four U.S. House races to be decided in Riverside County, with local voters choosing Democrats in two of the contests and Republicans in the others.
• The two state Senate races on the ballot in 2020 were also evenly split in Riverside County, with local voters picking a Democrat in one and a Republican in the other.
• In Riverside County, seven state assembly races were voted on in 2020. County voters chose Democrats in three of the contests and Republicans in three others. In the seventh race, county voters chose a “No Party Preference” candidate over a Republican.

See Riverside County’s full Nov. 3, 2020, Presidential General Election results here.

The post Certified Election Results Are In: Small Red Wave In Riverside County appeared first on The Hemet & San Jacinto Chronicle.

A 600-vote lead is big enough for Leticia Castillo to declare victory in what would be an upset in the race for a state Assembly seat representing part of the Inland Empire.

“To the voters, thank you for placing your faith and trust in me,” Castillo, a Republican, said in a statement issued Tuesday night, Nov. 26. “I will work tirelessly in Sacramento to fight for the People, striving to improve the lives of my constituents and all Californians.”

Castillo’s opponent, Democrat Clarissa Cervantes, isn’t ready to concede.

“There are still well over a thousand votes likely left in this race, and we are committed to ensuring every single vote is counted,” Cervantes said via text. It’s not clear where she’s getting that figure.

Cervantes said her supporters have helped “hundreds” of voters correct problems with their ballots that prevented them from being counted.

“However, the Riverside County Registrar of Voters appears to be waiting until the last minute to review most of these cures, risking the disenfranchisement of voters whose signature cure forms are deemed to still not match their voter registration card signature enough,” she said.

“We urge the Registrar to act swiftly and fairly to ensure that every cured ballot is reviewed thoroughly and every voter’s voice is heard. This election is too important to let bureaucracy stand in the way of democracy.”

The registrar’s office did not immediately respond Wednesday, Nov. 27, to a request for comment.

Going into Wednesday, Castillo led Cervantes by 600 votes — 50.2% to 49.8% — out of more than 155,000 ballots counted in California’s 58th Assembly District, according to online results posted by the California Secretary of State.

According to Castillo, just 500 ballots remain to be counted in the district. It’s not clear how her campaign arrived at that figure, but in a Wednesday email Castillo said her campaign declared victory based on registrar’s data and its analysis of the estimated unprocessed ballots in both Inland counties.

The 58th — Jurupa Valley, Grand Terrace and parts of Corona, Eastvale and Riverside — is currently represented by Cervantes’ sister, Assemblymember Sabrina Cervantes, D-Riverside, who is moving to the legislature’s upper chamber after winning a state Senate seat in the Tuesday, Nov. 5, election.

The plan was for Clarissa Cervantes, a Riverside city councilmember, to take her sister’s place in the Assembly. The 58th is friendly ground for Democrats, who make up 43% of the district’s registered voters compared to 28% for Republicans.

Clarissa Cervantes’ road to Sacramento got bumpy in 2023, when she pleaded guilty to drunk driving. It was her second DUI conviction in less than 10 years, and it became fodder for attacks against her in a primary featuring fellow Democrat and Riverside City Councilmember Ronaldo Fierro.

Despite that, Cervantes beat Fierro in the March primary and raised close to $1 million for her campaign, compared to roughly $81,000 that Castillo took in for her Assembly bid.

In her email, Castillo said her campaign is aware of the “significant voter registration gap between Democrats and Republicans” in the district.

“Our victory over the well-funded, well-supported, and well-known Clarissa Cervantes is a testament to the grace of God, the support of my family, the strategy and hard work of my team, and the will of Californians who have had enough of policies that have been detrimental to the daily lives of individuals, families, and businesses,” Castillo wrote.

If Castillo wins, two of the three assemblymembers representing the city of Riverside and its plurality of Democratic voters will be Republicans. The city is divided between the 58th, 60th (Assemblymember Corey Jackson, D-Moreno Valley) and 63rd (Assemblymember Bill Essayli, R-Corona) districts.

Castillo, a marriage and family therapist and Corona native, has consistently held a lead of at least several hundred votes in the days following the general election.

California takes weeks to count votes due to the large volume of mail-in ballots, which must be counted as long as they’re postmarked on or before Election Day and arrive no later than a week after Election Day.

Elections officials in Riverside and San Bernardino counties said they expect to wrap up vote-counting by Tuesday, Dec. 3.

The post Leticia Castillo declares victory in race for Inland Empire Assembly seat appeared first on The Hemet & San Jacinto Chronicle.

You won’t be surprised to hear that Donald Trump beat Kamala Harris in the Inland Empire. But Harris performed better here than you might have predicted.

In Riverside County, Harris had 48% of the vote as of Friday morning. In San Bernardino County, she had 46%. Sure, she lost, but in Kern County, she polled only 38%.

More predictable is how Steve Garvey fared versus Adam Schiff. If Garvey were representing the IE instead of the entire state, he’d be the new senator, and by a comfortable margin: He got 54% in San Bernardino County and 52% in Riverside County. Schiff won the state with 57%.

Now that’s the IE we know and love (or shake our head at).

Welcome to my post-election roundup. The above aside, the idea is to offer a few thoughts on local outcomes or trends, some of which might pass with little notice otherwise.

For starters, out in Needles, voters have — OK, just kidding. Let’s stick a bit closer to home. And we’ll begin with an unusual one.

In Menifee, the District 3 race’s ballot had a rarity, an official write-in candidate. Jay Sno-Fly as of Thursday had collected, ah, six votes. Sadly, Sno-Fly was no shoo-in.

More seriously, in many cities, council incumbents were returned without opposition, such as in Corona (Tony Daddario, Tom Richins), Chino Hills (Cynthia Moran) and Upland (Shannan Maust, Bill Velto). Or without breaking a sweat, such as in Claremont (Corey Calaycay, Sal Medina) and Ontario (Debra Porada).

Some contested races weren’t remotely close. Longtime Chino Mayor Eunice Ulloa creamed Paul Rodriguez, 72% to 28%, running over him like a tractor. In Rancho Cucamonga, Lynne Kennedy did even better, collecting 74% against Steven Lacey.

A few incumbents might have lost if not for a lucky break: having two challengers, not one. Again in Rancho Cucamonga, Ashley Stickler won with 41%, topping Luis Cetina and Erick Jimenez. This means 59% effectively voted against Stickler, but she won anyway.

Same in Fontana, where council outlier Jesse Sandoval, who often casts protest votes, won with 42% support, with two opponents splitting the anti-Sandoval vote.

Sometimes a candidate almost seems like an incumbent, even if they technically aren’t.

In Temecula, Matt Rahn had given up his council seat in 2022 to run unsuccessfully for state Assembly. He was back on the ballot Tuesday for his old council seat and won handily. It’ll be as if he never left.

In Pomona, John Nolte was trounced by Debra Martin, another familiar name who’d previously served a single term on the council from 2012-2016.

In San Bernardino, city of contrasts, two candidates who had once been incumbents both lost.

Henry Nickel, who was booted from his council seat in 2020, sought to return to the 5th Ward but lost to Kim Knaus. Jim Penman, who had been the elected city attorney until 2013, lost the 7th Ward race to Treasure Ortiz.

Name recognition can help but can do only so much.

Occasionally a city election is almost a free-for-all. In Norco, six candidates sought three seats, one of them open.

Robin Grundmeyer keeps her seat as the top vote-getter. Two newcomers, Greg Bowen and Fia Sullivan, will fill the other two slots. The other incumbent, Kathleen Aleman, who was opposed by most of the establishment and was passed over twice to be rotated into the mayor’s seat, finished fourth. Politics is a rough business.

The conservative tilt among some school boards remained or intensified. In Chino Valley Unified, the board’s lone dissenter, Don Bridge, opted not to run again after being on the losing end of dozens of 4-1 votes, and who could blame him? With the reelection of Andrew Cruz and James Na, and the election of John Cervantes, the board may go 5-0 to the right.

A few local ballot measures caught my attention.

In Riverside, voters approved Measure L, which establishes a city-selected government watchdog. We’ll have to keep an eye on that.

In Pomona, Measure Y, which was put on the ballot by nonprofits, would gradually shift an additional 10% of the city budget toward children. And away from what, exactly? Some 72% of the budget goes to public safety. This strikes me as a “defund the police” measure in disguise.

A one-cent sales tax appears headed for approval in Fontana, where Measure T was getting 52% support, and in Yucaipa, where Measure S had 60%. Each would put millions of dollars a year into city coffers.

Faced with an identical tax, Upland said: “Not so fast.” Measure N got clobbered, mustering only 35% support. City Hall would have gained $20 million a year to hire cops and pave the city’s notoriously potholed streets.

Uplanders, it seems, prefer to save their pennies, then give them directly to criminals and tire centers.

Lastly, if you’re among those who wonder if your vote matters, check out these two examples to the contrary.

In the Chino Valley Independent Fire District, incumbent John DeMonaco was at war with the firefighters union, which backed Andrew Romaine, a retired firefighter, with contributions the Chino Valley Champion reported as topping $77,000.

That’s a veritable firehose of cash. Also, it’s a lot of lettuce for Romaine.

Anyway, Romaine was ahead Wednesday by 35 votes, until things flip-flopped Thursday and DeMonaco was on top by four votes. His lead, such as it was, widened Friday to six votes.

Then consider the City Council in Montclair (pop. 36,000).

For the second of two seats on the ballot, incumbent Tenice Johnson and candidate Xavier Mendez on Wednesday were tied at 1,703 votes apiece. What were the odds? That shifted Thursday when Mendez inched ahead by eight votes, a lead cut to six votes on Friday.

Montclair’s Ben Lopez, meanwhile, had 2,416 votes as of late Friday. Lopez, the council’s pariah, who has been censured for misconduct and has cost City Hall more than $700,000 in legal payouts, is the top vote-getter? His showing must be satisfying for him, if not so much for his colleagues.

The post 2024 Election: A look at notable results around the Inland Empire appeared first on The Hemet & San Jacinto Chronicle.

Donald Trump had a “good faith” basis to question the results of the 2020 election, his lawyers said in demanding that prosecutors turn over any evidence related to voting irregularities and potential foreign interference in the contest won by Democrat Joe Biden.

A defense motion filed late Monday in federal court in Washington asserts that Trump was not obligated to accept at face value the judgments of government officials who time and again found no widespread fraud in the election. It floats the possibility that foreign actors might have influenced the race and alleges that federal officials gave “false assurances” to the public about the security of the election that “outpaced” what the government actually knew. “It was not unreasonable at the time, and certainly not criminal, for President Trump to disagree with officials now favored by the prosecution and to rely instead on the independent judgment that the American people elected him to use while leading the country,” the lawyers wrote.

The filing is the clearest indication yet that Trump’s lawyers are hoping to sow doubt before a jury in the legitimacy of the race or at least make the case that his skepticism was justified and not motivated by criminal intent.

The lawyers seek permission to force special counsel Jack Smith’s team to produce vast swaths of information that they say could aid the defense, including the “impact of foreign influence” and “actual and attempted compromises of election infrastructure” as well as evidence of potential “political bias” that could have shaped the intelligence community’s assessment of the election.

Courts around the country and Trump’s own attorney general have found no evidence of fraud that could have affected the outcome, and the Homeland Security Department’s cybersecurity arm pronounced it “the most secure in American history.” Smith’s team alleges that Trump, a Republican, ignored all of those findings and launched an illegal plot to undo the election and block the peaceful transfer of power.

But the Trump lawyers assert in the 37-page filing that he had reason to question the results. The motion recounts Russian efforts in 2016 to undermine confidence in that year’s election, though it glosses over the intelligence community’s assessment that Moscow had a “clear preference” for Trump over his Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton.

It also revisits the intelligence community’s effort in 2020 to discern potential interference by countries including Russia, China and Iran. It quotes from a Jan. 7, 2021 memo from John Ratcliffe, the then-director of national intelligence and a close Trump ally, that said China sought to influence the election. And it seeks information from prosecutors about a Russian cyberespionage campaign in 2019 and 2020 that affected numerous federal government agencies, with the lawyers saying that that intrusion calls into question the confidence being expressed by officials at that time in the security of the election. “The Office cannot blame President Trump for public discord and distrust of the 2020 election results while refusing to turn over evidence that foreign actors stoked the very same flames that the Office identifies as inculpatory in the indictment,” the motion states.

It goes on to say: “The Office cannot rely on selected guidance and judgments by officials it favors from the Intelligence Community and law enforcement while ignoring evidence of political bias in those officials’ decision-making as well as cyberattacks and other interference, both actual and attempted, that targeted critical infrastructure and election facilities before, during, and after the 2020 election.” Defense lawyers are also seeking to force prosecutors to turn over documents related to the Jan. 6, 2021 riot at the U.S. Capitol, when pro-Trump loyalists stormed the building in a violent confrontation with police in an effort to disrupt the counting of electoral votes.

The attorneys are looking in part for statements by prosecutors in other riot-related cases that they say could conflict with the Smith team’s assertion that Trump was responsible for the violence at the Capitol that day. The Trump lawyers have already asked U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan to dismiss the indictment, saying he is shielded from prosecution by presidential immunity and arguing that the charges violate his First Amendment rights. Those requests are still pending.

Find your latest news here at the Hemet & San Jacinto Chronicle

The post Trump’s lawyers argue he had good basis to question election results appeared first on The Hemet & San Jacinto Chronicle.