Candidate can’t wait for the results -- but she must

When I last spoke to Janet Nguyen, she was sitting on a 52-vote lead to become an Orange County supervisor but telling her supporters the victory wasn’t yet in the bag.

She proved a prophet, because a count of additional ballots the next day left her seven votes behind Trung Nguyen in the official count for the 1st District supervisorial seat.

Here we are two weeks later, and history is on pause. Janet Nguyen, who at 30 would become the county’s youngest supervisor ever, has asked for a recount, and as I feverishly type Wednesday afternoon, eagle-eyed ballot counters and sharp-eyed campaign advisors from both camps are going ballot by ballot.

The two Nguyens aren’t related by anything other than their desire to be the first Vietnamese American member of the board. Janet Nguyen would also be the first woman ever elected from the 1st District.

By midafternoon Wednesday, she was still waving the yellow caution flag. “We’re still going to wait till the whole thing is counted,” she said. But she admitted to feeling more uncomfortable about waiting this one out than she did on election night Feb. 6.

“Election day is the finish line, and whatever the result is, you’re going to accept it and you’re done,” she said. Instead, the closeness of the vote made it a no-brainer for her to request the recount and amounted to running another lap in a race she thought had ended. What should have been a cool-down period became a heat-up period.

I unsuccessfully tried to bait her into saying something snarky about Mike Schroeder, a Trung Nguyen advisor who told the Orange County Register two weeks ago that, by challenging the official vote count, she risked coming across like Al Gore in 2000 and being labeled a “sore loser.”

Surely the politically nimble Mr. Schroeder was spinning on one foot as he said that; to not ask for a recount after a seven-vote loss out of 46,000 cast would reflect a poor grasp of numbers and common sense. Assuming that a recount wouldn’t produce the exact same vote tally as before, it’s just as likely that Janet would make up seven votes as it is that Trung would add seven to his margin. After the first day of counting, for example, she’d picked up four votes and trailed by only three.

But Schroeder unwittingly raises a provocative issue: Just for grins, let’s say Janet Nguyen wins this recount by seven votes. If I were Trung, I’d want another count, which theoretically would produce yet another result.

One pictures moving on into infinity to determine which Nguyen wins.

Thankfully, this should be the last count. There’s no provision at the county level for either candidate to ask for another. The only recourse would be a legal challenge, and we know Schroeder wouldn’t advise Trung Nguyen to do it, for fear of appearing a poor loser. And at that point, I can’t imagine Janet Nguyen thinking that would be worth it for her either.

Sometimes, people just lose elections by seven votes. The recount should be done by week’s end.

I had described Nguyen in print as being pretty cool on election night two weeks ago. I asked her Wednesday how she’d felt the next day when she realized that her lead had evaporated. “It made me sick,” she said, “but I realized it was not over.”

She said she had no intention of watching the recount unfold. Something about maintaining that image of coolness, which may not be possible as ballot challenges come and go. “I was told to stay away by my attorneys,” she said, laughing. “This is a time to let the bulldogs out the door and let them deal with it.”

One of those “bulldogs” is her brother-in-law Jimmy Gaughan. I met him at her headquarters on election night, and he’s much too pleasant to be a bulldog, but I talked to him briefly Wednesday afternoon and he said, “It’s intriguing just watching it.”

This isn’t exactly Bush-Gore in Florida, however, and I asked Gaughan, who runs a mortgage business in Garden Grove, if he was bored. “It’s not boring,” he said. “It’s a blast for me. Just watching the whole process go through.”

I put in a call to Trung Nguyen’s campaign officials to see if they also were having a blast, but didn’t get a return call.

Who knows, maybe Trung’s bulldogs are more serious than Janet’s.

Dana Parsons’ column appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Saturdays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821 or at dana

.parsons@latimes.com. An archive of his recent columns is at www.latimes.com/parsons.