SUSD incumbents win

Nearly complete returns in Tuesday’s historic election show that voters returned one-term incumbent Democrat Gabrielle Giffords to her 8th Congressional District seat and elected three Republicans in Legislative District 30: Jonathan Paton for a state Senate seat and Frank Antenori and David Gowan for two state Representative seats.

Incumbents Diana Kellermeyer and Elaine Hall apparently won in the race for three seats on the Sahuarita Unified School District Governing Board, with 12 of 13 precincts reporting. Kris Ham, who has been closely connected to the district as a volunteer, had a 317-vote lead Wednesday over Raytheon employee Michael Kennedy Jr., with 2,550 votes to Kennedy’s 2,233.

Kellermeyer led with 2,751 votes and Hall had 2,563. Trailing were Kathryn Zanin, an employee of the Tucson school system, with 2,040 votes and Nathaniel Irvin, a Raytheon employee, with 1,686.

Local candidates lost in races for one countywide and two state legislative races.

Paton, who is a state Representative in District 30 and now represents Green Valley, easily defeated Democrat Georgette Valle of Green Valley, with a 59 percent to 40 percent margin.

Newcomers Gowan (45,835 votes) and Antenori (45,035 votes) defeated Andrea Dalessandro of Sahuarita, who got 41,108 votes, in a three-way race for two seats in District 30.

Sahuarita resident Harry Shaw, a Republican, got 103,948 votes and was swamped by incumbent Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik, who garnered 190,396 votes.

Turn out lower

Despite predictions of a historic turnout, some 50,000 fewer people voted in Pima County than in the 2004 General Election. Turnout this year was 64.4 percent in Pima County, as 319,891 people cast ballots out of 498,777 registered voters, with 10 precincts yet to be tallied. That compared to 369,321 who voted in 2004, for a turnout rate of 82.4 percent. There were 448,050 registered voters in November 2004.

Still, the heavy turnout and new voting security procedures slowed the counting in Pima County, where each precinct’s ballots had to be transported to a regional center, and only then could totals be transmitted electronically to the countywide counting center. In the past, totals were sent electronically from each precinct shortly after the polls closed at 7 p.m. on Election Day.

In Santa Cruz County, turnout this year was 58.8 percent, with 12,508 voting out of a registered total of 21,287.

Statewide, turnout was 63.8 percent, with 1,906,330 people voting out of 2,987,451 registered voters.

The race for Arizona Corporation Commission, in which Democrats outpolled Republicans in what is a basically no-name contest, raises the question of whether Arizona is still a red state or is now a swing state.

Two Democrats won and a third was leading a close race for the third open seat on the Arizona Corporation Commission. With all but 20 precincts reporting out of 2,239 statewide, Cochise County Boardmember Paul Newman and Sandra Kennedy won with 18.1 percent of the total vote each and in the race for the third slot, Democrat Sam George, at 16.2 percent, led Republican Bob Stump, also with 16.2 percent, as George had 757,144 votes and Stump 756,493.

For president

The commission race was the only statewide race aside from the contest for president, in which favorite son John McCain, a Republican U.S. senator from Arizona, easily won the state by a 53.7 to 45.1 percent margin over U.S. Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill).

Results available Wednesday morning included 407 precincts reporting out of a total of 417 in Pima County and 1,132 precincts out of 1,142 in Maricopa County, with complete returns available in the state’s 13 other counties.

Republican State Rep. Marian McClure of Tucson, who now represents Green Valley in District 30, was running last in the ACC race at 15.6 percent, behind Republican Barry Wong at 15.8 percent.

Giffords led Republican state Senate President Tim Bee with 54.7 percent to 42.9 percent, with five Pima County precincts not yet posted on the Pima County or Arizona Secretary of State Web sites. Statewide, Democrats added another representative in District 1, Ann Kirkpatrick, who defeated GOP candidate Sydney Hay. That gave the Democrats a 5 to 3 seat edge among the state’s congressional delegation, while both U.S. senators are from the GOP in Arizona.

Other Pima County incumbents won easy re-elections, including Democratic County Attorney Barbara LaWall over Republican Brad Roach. Democratic County Board member Sharon Bronson (District 3) defeated Republican Barney Brenner in a rematch of their razor-thin 2000 race. That race could have tipped the partisan balance on the board had Brenner won, but a Democratic board remapped the district in 2002 and added heavily Democratic precincts to Bronson’s district.

pfranchine@gvnews.com | 547-9738