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Health & Fitness

My Foggy Crystal Ball

It's Election Day. Make a prediction on the outcome of the NUSD Board of Trustees race before the polls close at 8 p.m.

It’s Election Day, and two-thirds of us who are going to vote are expected to have already cast our ballots by mail. The counting, however, doesn’t start until the remaining third pull the curtain and then pull the levers by 8 p.m. today. We’ve got some time to kill, then, those of us who are really interested in the elections. So let’s show our predilection for making predictions.

I’ll go first. I don’t know of any surveys done on the local front, so I can’t rely on any pollsters’ hypotheses.  I can only rely on what I’ve read on the Patch and in the IJ, and what I’ve seen and heard around town. Without further ado, my totally-unscientific guess at how the NUSD Board of Trustees election will go. Note the use of the word “will” in that sentence. I’m not saying this is how I think it should go or how I wish it would go.

Debbie Butler will be easily re-elected, and she’ll be the high vote getter. She has been willing to take stances, whether you agree with them or not, which have put her in the camps of the majority of Novato parents paying attention. Most folks also believe she is the most prepared and thoughtful of the board members up for re-election. Then there’s the fact that at least one principal encouraged all the parents at her school to vote for Butler at a Back to School night in September.

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Tom Cooper will be re-elected, garnering the second highest number of votes. He doesn’t seem to attract the vitriol the remaining two board members running seem to attract. He’s got a plus, too, in that he can put the title of board president before his name.

Ross Millerick and Cindi Clinton will also be re-elected, each vying to eke out the other so as not to be the low vote-getter. While Millerick is given points for the passion he exuded in the debates, not enough voters actually attended or watched the debates to have that mean much. Clinton gets points for her “master’s degrees” — sorry, couldn’t help using the quotation marks — and her Sacramento goings-on which are described in her candidate’s statement and in the IJ profile of her. Clinton, though, is seen as wishy-washy and prone to the overuse of the word “choice.” Millerick is seen as having been on the board far too many years.

Find out what's happening in Novatowith free, real-time updates from Patch.

Newcomer Jeffrey Vaillant won’t make it on the board. He’ll get a lot of votes from the dissatisfied, but that number won’t be able to overcome the number of votes cast by the uninvolved voters out there who are dazzled by the shiny label of “incumbent” next to a candidate’s name.

Non-runner-but-still-on-the-ballot Nicole Tedeschi Blok will get an embarrassingly sizable number of votes from the people wanting to send a message to the four candidates currently on the board.

There will be plenty of write-in votes, none of which will count or be counted as there is no write-in candidate registered with the County Elections Department. Michael Christian, Ross Ingles, MJ Lonson, Jennifer Treppa and Daffy Duck are all likely entries in that game.

So, my prediction is all four sitting candidates are voted in for another four years, with Butler getting to do the happy in-your-face dance at a future board meeting.

What about you? What’s your prediction?

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