It ain't over for the citizens of San Bernardino County

With the polls being monitored by the feds in Riverside County, incumbent DA Pacheco loses. Mmh--coincidence? If you want a comparison, consider this--in the Ramos-Conaway-Guzman race for DA in San Bernardino, as groups of precincts were reported throughout the night, the percentage of spread never changed more than 1 percent--what is the likelihood that the vote-by-mail (VBM) percentages would also be the percentage spread throughout the night for all the precincts reporting in-person-at-the-polls voting in a demographically diverse county such as ours? Historically in the rest of the state, the republican incumbents lose ground at the polls and when they win, it is because of the margin built up with the banked-up VBM votes. In the Ramos-Conaway-Guzman race against Ramos, the incalculable damage from two elected democrats (Baca & Gonzales) endorsing the republican incumbent may have been a factor (heh Joe and Josie, is it true the only reason you endorsed Ramos is because he was hispanic??), the slate mailers to democrats listing Ramos with democrats endorsed state-wide confused democratic voters (I had supporters calling expressing confusion even though they knew I was the candidate endorsed by the Democratic Party Central Committee in San Bernardino County) and the slate mailers to republicans listing him with state-wide endorsed republicans (when he was not endorsed by the County Republican Central Committee) may have been factors as was the inexplicable under performance of Guzman (he dropped 5 percentage points from his 2000 election run against Ramos, a differential that meant the difference between a June 8 win for Ramos and a run-off between Ramos and Conaway--maybe the result of the "Um" lawsuit filed by an alleged long time ally of Ramos??). The election of 2010 will go down as the fruits of another example of Ramos' willingness to deceive or deliberately mislead public for votes--you know the guy we call our top cop--wow--am I the only person bothered by that personality streak?? The saddest part of the effort, is that the campaign was loaded with substantive issues about case backlogs, poor conviction rates, the DA's office being over budget, and questions about misuse of power for political purposes, the death penalty policies in light of budgetary problems facing the County--the press consistently recapped this contest as being about Ramos' alleged affairs--the result, the press narrowed the campaign dialogue to what Ramos quickly denied (the improper sexual contact with County workers, a conclusion facilitated by a report the current Board of Supervisors paid $140,000 of taxpayer money to prepare in advance of the election--hmm, should that $140,000 be reported as a campaign contribution to Ramos?) and by that, sterilized the race, denied voters the dialogue they were entitled to hear and gave Ramos the election. I did my part to create the dialogue. I could not overcome the headwinds of corruption, media bias, potential ethnic bias and abuse leading up to June 8, 2010. Stay tuned. It ain't over (the election is, but regrettably, not the corrupt leadership nor the effort to hold accountable those running amuk).