Two weeks later, a Newsom measure for the homeless is still hanging in the balance

Two weeks after Super Tuesday, the vote in California is still too close to invoke a mental health ballot measure, which is a key part of Governor Gavin Newsom’s plan to address homelessness .

Proposal 1 would easily pass. The $6.4 billion bond measure would fund housing and treatment for homeless people with mental illness or addiction, and California voters have repeatedly cited homelessness as one of their top concerns.

But as of Tuesday morning, the yes vote on the measure was ahead by fewer than 20,000 votes out of more than 7 million votes cast. According to the California Secretary of State’s office, and approximately 220,000 ballots remained to be counted. The Associated Press has not yet announced the results.

The margin is so small that both supporters and opponents have now begun efforts to “fix” mail-in ballots that have so far been excluded from the count because the signatures on them did not match those in state records. Paul Mitchell, a Democratic political consultant and political data expert, said in a social media post this week that the state had received just over 42,500 ballots with mismatched signatures.

Under state law, voters are notified when such a discrepancy occurs and are given the opportunity to fill out a form to have their ballots counted.

“This ballot initiative is SO CLOSE that your commitment to volunteering could mean the difference between people getting off the streets and getting the treatment they need … or not,” Mr. Newsom’s federal political action committee told the House last week supporters, calling on them to contact Democrats whose ballots had been rejected.

The efforts to improve elections could impact more than just the statewide proposal: one Silicon Valley congressional districtFor example, there are only 12 votes separating two of the contenders for a spot in November’s runoff, but according to Mr. Mitchell, there are 553 mail-in ballots that were rejected due to signature issues.

Officials with the pro-Proposition 1 effort said last week that they expected the measure to pass, and that the call for voting restoration was merely a safety net. But on Monday, a campaign spokesman said training of volunteers for the voter campaign had begun this weekend.

On Monday, opponents of Proposition 1 — a coalition of civil rights, disability rights and mental health programs that could lose funding under the measure — announced that they, too, wanted to reach voters whose ballots may have been rejected.

“We don’t know if reviving rejected ballots will change the outcome of this election,” said Paul Simmons, executive director of Californians Against Prop. 1, said in a statement. “But if the governor thinks so, we damn sure won’t let him have the field to himself.”