TVUSD Trustee Komrosky is recalled

The Riverside County Registrar of Voters (ROV) certified election results on June 20th. What's next?

On June 20, 2024, the Riverside ROV certified the results of the June 4, 2024, election to recall Temecula Valley Unified School District (TVUSD) Trustee Joseph Komrosky.

Voters residing in Trustee Area 4 were the only ones eligible to vote. Of those 21,578 registered voters, 9,722 (or 45.1%) voted in the special recall election.

Certified results show that 51.09% (4,963) voted YES to recall and 48.91% (4,751) voted NO. Komrosky was removed from his position as of the certification date.

The recall is a significant achievement. Many people oppose the idea of recalling an elected official and vote against any recall on principle. Temecula as a whole and especially Komrosky’s trustee area typically vote conservative, and Komrosky claimed to represent conservatives. But local parents, grandparents, teachers, and community members displeased with his fiscal irresponsibility and extreme policies worked for months to unseat him—first by gaining enough petition signatures to force a recall election, and then by encouraging voters to vote YES.

For more information about Komrosky and the recall, read Why did Temecula voters elect conservative trustees in 2022 but decide to recall one of them within a year?

Why did it take so long to certify results?

Some voters have wondered why the election results weren’t known earlier. The delay is normal for elections here. In Riverside County (CA), all registered voters receive mail-in ballots. Most people (about 90%) choose to complete their ballot before election day and either mail it or drop it in a secure drop box at specified locations. Other voters choose to vote in person at Vote Centers before or on election day.

Voters who haven’t received a ballot ahead of time can vote in person. People who haven’t registered to vote within 14 days before an election can still register; they just complete a Same Day Voter Registration (Conditional Voter Registration) and vote in person.

All these options mean it takes a while to count the ballots.

No ballots are counted until polls close on election day. At that point the ROV starts opening and counting mail-in and drop-off ballots. As soon as ballots arrive from polling locations, they start counting those, too. The ROV posts results starting election night and continuing for the next several days.

But some ballots arrive later. If you mail your ballot on election day, it is counted if received within seven days (in this election, on or before June 11). If you register and vote using Same-Day Voter Registration, ROV has to verify your registration, which takes time. And suppose you forgot to sign the ballot envelope, or your signature is different from your registration; in those cases the ROV will ask you to “cure” your ballot by signing it correctly. In this election the ROV gave voters until June 18 to cure their ballots and still have them counted.

So waiting until June 20th to know the final results may be frustrating for those involved in the election, but it’s a normal timeframe.

Was the count valid?

This is a question you shouldn’t have to ask. Elections in the U.S.A. have been found over and over again—by election officials from both parties and by courts—to be free of any substantial fraud. We are lucky to live in a country in which that’s true.

In California, you can track when your ballot was received and counted through Where’s My Ballot? You can also read information about California’s voting system security. For the recall election, you could watch Riverside ROV counting ballots in a livestream. (It was pretty boring, but you could.)

Of course that didn’t stop people on social media from saying they’d “heard” all sorts of oddities in the recall election: that 1000 people over the age of 90 voted, for example, or that the county might be “curing” ballots in favor of one side.

This is all nonsense, folks. Don’t fall for it.

As people who worked hard for the recall, talking to voters and knocking on doors, we see exactly what we expected: the voters in Temecula are pretty evenly split. That was true in November 2022 as well: no one won by a landslide.

And that’s something all trustees, now and in the future, need to understand. They may have been elected, but they didn’t receive any kind of mandate. This assumption of a mandate is what got Komrosky, Wiersma, and Gonzalez in trouble: they failed to listen to at least half of our community and instead plowed ahead with their extreme, divisive policies.

Extremes on either side are not wanted here. School Board Trustees serve ALL the residents, not just the ones who elected them. Their job is to listen to everyone and then decide how best to educate ALL the students in our community.

What happens now?

As noted, Komrosky has been removed from office. Because Danny Gonzalez resigned from the Board in December 2023 and the remaining Trustees failed to appoint anyone to replace him (despite a wealth of qualified candidates), the normally five-person board now has only three members. Three is a quorum, so they can still do business as long as all of them attend the meeting.

Voters will choose Gonzalez’s and Komrosky’s replacements in the election this coming November. We urge everyone to pay attention to the candidates.

A Trustee’s job is not easy. We need Trustees who will bring people together, not push them apart. We need Trustees who fully support public education, our teachers, and our students. We need Trustees who understand that their job is nonpartisan, that their personal religion and politics must play no role in their decisions, and that they represent everyone in our community.

Please consider candidates carefully this November.