There will be no recount of the primary election results.

On Election Day, candidate parties usually begin around 8pm. That’s when the polls close, and when a campaign staffer or volunteer will begin furiously refreshing the Monterey County Elections Department website for initial results.

Sometimes – most of the time – the initial results, reflecting vote-by-mail ballots already received, show a clear winner.

But in close races, there’s no telling what the outcome will be. In 2020 in Del Rey Oaks, initial results showed Gary Kreeger gaining a seat on City Council with a seven-vote lead, but Scott Donaldson pulled ahead and prevailed. In 2012 in Greenfield, initial results showed then-mayor John Huerta being recalled, but later ballots changed the outcome and he kept his seat by a 69-vote margin.

In the six-way race for Monterey County supervisor for District 2, early results were a nail-biter. Glenn Church held a steady first place that never wavered. But with a runoff in November, it quickly became a contest for second place. Initial results showed Kimbley Craig 95 votes ahead of Regina Gage. But each new report from the elections office put them closer and closer together, and Gage sealed the second-place spot with an 18-vote margin.

As the margin shrank, Craig wanted to know what her options were. So she hired an election lawyer, Bradley W. Hertz of the Sutton Law Firm in Los Angeles. (The Weekly received all emails related to a recount via a California Public Records Act request.) Hertz emailed Monterey County Registrar of Voters Gina Martinez to ask some basic questions: “We are interested in knowing the estimated costs and timing of a recount.”

What he got back was a series of questions and a range of figures. (The cost is critical, because whoever requests a recount must pay for it.) The estimated staff time for the first day of a recount would cost $5,400. Subsequent days for a manual tally would be $6,000. Supplies: $1,500. If Craig were to request a recount, an estimated $18,930 would be due 24 hours before election officials would begin counting ballots.

Hertz sent back a bunch of clarifying questions – how many staff per task at what rate, etc. These are mundane questions about how to calculate the cost of a government job. And instead of answers, he got back an email from Deputy County Counsel Anne K. Brereton: “Your client has been given a courtesy estimate of the feed for the recount to assist with her decision. Once a formal request is made, a final cost will be given.”

This is a wild way to charge anyone for anything. First you have to commit to the recount, which may well exceed an entire campaign’s fundraising totals. Only then will officials give you an exact figure.

“Other counties have pre-printed schedules,” Hertz says. “It struck me as extremely high, as well as not being very detailed. It almost felt like an effort to say, ‘go away, don’t bother us, don’t peel back the layers of the onion.”

Nevada County estimates the cost of a recount at $625/day. Shasta County, $870/day. Sutter County, $2,184/day. Monterey County’s estimate: $5,400/day.

There are good reasons to charge for a recount. It shouldn’t be the norm – voters must trust the integrity of the system for the system to work. In this election, officials manually counted hundreds of ballots and all the results matched up with the machine count. Hertz (and Craig) do trust the Monterey County system. Hertz advised Craig that with more than a 0.5-percent loss, a recount was unlikely to reveal enough miscounted ballots, if any, to change the outcome. So Craig, who as mayor of Salinas has another political future to consider, accepted the results.

“There is no reason to distrust the outcome,” Hertz says. “It would have been nice to be able to do a recount, because you learn a lot. An election is not an exact science.”

Part of that inexact science includes voter trust, which in light of a widespread effort to steal the vote in 2020, might be at an all-time low. Local election officials can help rebuild that trust.

Elections work best with full transparency and a lot of communication with the public. Martinez has already committed to clearer communication in the future about how results are posted. That is a good start.

SARA RUBIN is the Weekly’s editor. Reach her at sara@mcweekly.com or follow her at twitter.com/sarahayleyrubin.