• Fun With Stats Through The Lens of Wildomar City Council Elections

I asked Perplexity AI (which I've found to be one of the better ones) the following question: 

Let's test your ability to retrieve statistics in election results. 

Okay, I'm thinking of the city of Wildomar. It's not a very old city. There haven't been that many elections. So which city council member, since 2008, has received the most votes? 

Second question: which city council member received the highest percentage? 

Two different statistics.

Most votes, highest percentage. On your mark, get set, go!

I still find it entertaining to talk to these AIs as if they're a real person (yes, I'm easily amused, lol).

My guess had been that Bridgette Moore or Bob Cashman would have been the highest vote getter, as he had the most votes in the inaugural election in 2008.

I found that the single election top vote-getter is:

Bridgette Moore! 

In 2012 she got nearly 5,000 votes, a total of 4,874.

As you can see from the graphic above, there are two legitimate categories for highest percentage. 

First are the uncontested examples

You may be wondering why those uncontested seats were on the ballot, but the two uncontested seats in 2026 were not.

There is a state law that requires uncontested seats to be on the ballot if there is another item from the city. In 2018, Measure A was on the ballot, so both District 1 and 5 had to be on the ballot, too, despite there being no opponent.

That's happened this year in Lake Elsinore. 

For uncontested seats, the record is 100%. Even if the total number of votes had been 11, it still would have been 100%. 

The second category is for a contested seat

That goes to Mr. Wildomar Rap, Joseph Morabito, with a highwater mark of 71.18%.

Just edging out Bridgette Moore's 70.9%. It can't go unsaid that she had TWO opponents, and got over 700 more votes than Morabito (sorry about the third-person nonsense). 

A fair thing to note, not that it diminishes the numbers, but District 4 happens during Presidential years, and the turnout is always much greater in those years. 

Imagine if we were talking about Home Run leaders and one person played in a bandbox like Fenway Park, and the other played in the old Houston Astrodome, lol. 

As of the last count in the 2026 District 5 City Council election, incumbent Ashlee DePhillippo had a comfortable lead, and Wildomar Rap declared her the winner. 

• City Council Meeting August Special Meeting

Very brief meeting followed by a workshop that lasted about an hour. 

The meeting had one item of  "special business," which was to decide whether to hold city council elections in districts 1 and 3 with just one name on the ballot. If you blinked two weeks ago you missed the close of the nomination period for a name to be put on the ballot.

This is an election year where the terms of three city council seats are concluding. That's districts 1, 3, and 5.

There was only one non-incumbent, Pedro Magdaleno, who went to the trouble of meeting with the city clerk (takes about an hour), getting the necessary signatures (twenty), and turning them in before the deadline (literally done in the last hours of the final day)... but has never been to a city council meeting to weigh in on any topic —ever. 

Not even to introduce himself as someone looking to represent the city. 

I'd like to know why he thinks he's a better option than incumbent Ashlee DePhillippo, who has done an outstanding job representing the residents of our town. 

Oh, he didn't submit any contact information or even a ballot statement along with the nomination papers. Call me jaded if you want, but how can I be expected to take this as a serious candidacy? 

One more factoid of interest with the challenger for District 5, his wife works for the city... can you say "awkward!"

No photos of challenger Pedro Magdaleno were submitted to the city or found after an internet search. 

The estimated cost for placing the uncontested city council races on the ballot was said to be $30,000. 

One reason for having an uncontested seat on the ballot is to make room for a write-in candidate. 

I asked if voting for Mickey Mouse would be counted (*historically, Mickey gets votes in nearly every election throughout the country), and the answer is that such votes may be kept unofficially, but they don't show up in the official box score.

For example, in the 2024 County Supervisor race, there was a write-in candidate. He got 9 votes out of 102,279 cast. With these facts in mind, I made a motion to adopt option 1: appointing nominees for districts 1 and 3 in lieu of an election on November 3rd.

•

Long-Range Service Plan Community Workshop

In lieu of a recap, I'll summarize the four minute comment by the city manager that touched on the point of this endeavor. I'll leave a cued up link to his comments if you'd like to hear them as they were uttered (I'd suggest doing so). 

A slide from the presentation. Use the link to access the full 13 slide presentation.

Link to slides

Wildomar City Manager Chris Mann said the quiet part out loud at last night's meeting. The city is basically 18 years old now, and in his words, it's "coming into adulthood."

That's not just a nice line. He walked everyone back through the rough early years after incorporation. The state yanked Vehicle License Fee funding. Parks got fenced off after a ballot measure failed. Public safety staffing was thin, to put it kindly.

Fast forward to today and things look different. Voters passed Measure Z to get the parks reopened. Measure AA added a one percent sales tax. The economy grew. Property tax revenue eventually replaced what the state took away.

Add it all up and the city has a structurally balanced budget. Mann says it can probably stay that way, as long as everyone stays careful with it.

But here's the catch. Balanced budget doesn't mean Wildomar has caught up to its neighbors.

The city just doesn't have the land to build the kind of big shopping centers, logistics hubs, or auto malls that pump serious tax revenue into cities like Murrieta or Temecula. Economic development still matters, Mann said, but it's not going to close that gap on its own.

On top of that, Wildomar inherited a rough road system from the county. A lot of it was never even paved. And there are still big open questions hanging out there. A community center. A senior center. Equestrian space, ball fields, a skate park, maybe aquatics. Plus long term staffing for deputies and fire stations.

So what's the move? 

Mann put it back on the community. Wildomar can keep taxes low and settle for more modest amenities. That's a real option, and a fair one.

Or it can chase the kind of services and amenities Murrieta and Temecula offer. But that path isn't free. It means new revenue has to come from somewhere.

What the city can't do, according to Mann, is keep drifting without a plan. Build one thing, expand another, and wake up one day having missed the stuff that actually mattered most.

That's the point of the process happening right now. Get everyone rowing toward the same roadmap, so decisions get made on purpose instead of by accident.

Wildomar Rap opinion time

I've always been a realist, but the condition has become more pronounced as the decades have rolled by. 

I can appreciate the efforts of the staff to put together such a presentation, even if the staff in this case are an outside agency contracted for "not to exceed $55K," but not really see the ROI (Return On Investement). 

I've seen very many similar workshops (a parks masterplan of 2014 comes to mind, where, in reality, the only differences today are things that did NOT come from that past effort). 

Blog about the 2014 workshop

There was another parks visioning workshop about five years later... 

Blog about 2018-2019 workshop

We voted to save $30,000 tonight by removing uncontested city council seats from the ballot, if it had been up to me, this event would have never made it out of the talking stage. 

Minimally, I would have wanted to push this as far as possible before seeking outside help. I get it, I'm the one who taught Thomas how to doubt, but I've yet to see the Warner Bros. frog sing, for all the promises made before the show started. 

Michigan J Frog, at your service

Instead of belaboring this, I support the effort since the city is spending money on it, but understand that once the hoopla is over and done, it'll get filed away into the memory hole of yesteryear and never get brought up again. 

Remember, there's an even more expensive study (a specific plan for a new historic downtown). If you missed my rants about it, and haven't already had your fill of my brand of reality, here's a link to what the city is budgeting more than $450,000 for that beauty. 

I wrote a blog about that one too

Bottom line

We are fiscally hemmed in with very little wiggle room for any additions to anything in Wildomar. That's simply a fact that can't be papered over or workshopped around.

In the City Manager's opening remarks, he said in less direct wording, we can have anything if you're ready to pay higher taxes to get it. 

The question you have to ask yourself is if you think 67% of the voters in Wildomar are ready to take on a higher tax liability to get things like a community center, develop the parkland we've had on the books for years, and many other basic things most other cities have... my read of the community is that there isn't a groundswell to take on significant debt to pay for such amenities. 

If you have opinions about it, let's hear what they are!

•

A word on Mickey Mouse as a write-in candidate since WWII

I asked AI Claude to weigh in... Mickey Mouse really is the reigning champ of unqualified write-in votes. He shows up in basically every county's discard pile, election after election, decade after decade. One political scientist quoted in a piece about it put it well: Mickey Mouse is often called the most reliable "guest star" among fake write-in candidates, showing up on discard piles alongside Donald Duck and "None of the Above." The American Prospect

A few data points on scale:

• In Orange County, Florida alone in 2016, Mickey Mouse pulled in 1,103 write-in votes across races including president, senator, congress, state attorney, tax collector, and property appraiser. Spectrum News
• In 2020, Orange County voters wrote him in 391 times for property appraiser and another 555 times for sheriff alone. Spectrum News
• Election workers seem to expect it at this point. A Georgia election official said flatly that if Mickey doesn't get votes in an election, it's a bad election. The American Prospect

So the honest answer to "is it Mickey Mouse" is: yes, by reputation and by the sheer number of elections and jurisdictions he shows up in. But here's the important caveat — there's no single national tally of unqualified write-ins. Every state, and often every county, handles this differently. Some (like Maryland) don't track them at all unless the "candidate" has formally filed. Florida counties, by contrast, have released detailed spreadsheets in response to records requests, which is where most of these Mickey Mouse numbers come from.

So Mickey doesn't have one all-time record number, he's more like the most consistently popular fake write-in across time and geography, which is probably the more interesting story for your purposes anyway. Runners-up worth a mention if you want to have fun with it: Donald Duck is a perennial close second, Jesus Christ shows up constantly, and depending on the election cycle you'll see everyone from Harambe the gorilla to the Flying Spaghetti Monster to "U R Mom." The American Prospect

• It's An Election Year: Morabito Declares Candidacy For Re-Election

It's an election year, and that includes three seats on the Wildomar City Council: districts 1, 3, and 5. 

NOT IN THIS JUNE'S PRIMARY ELECTION, IN NOVEMBER

Joseph Morabito (the writer of Wildomar Rap) is making it official that he's running for a third term from District 3.

Here are what I'd include in my list of accomplishments in order of magnitude:

DISCLAIMER: Even if a particular council member is a primary mover of an item, it takes three votes to make anything happen; a team effort.

Not in the old David Letterman reverse top 10, but starting with number 1:

1) City Hall Purchase With No City Funds in 2023


The city's lease on the building was going to expire in less than two years, and staff were busy looking to see what the other options might be. 

We were seriously discussing several unpalatable options at a city council meeting when I asked the city manager if he could inquire one more time if the landlords of our building would be willing to sell.

The purchase was made with federal money, so we owe nobody anything.

Such an honor to have been the mayor when this happened.

We stopped being renters (something I had always bemoaned) and, in the process, started saving about half a million dollars a year by not paying rent. 

2) Livestream City Council Meetings 2018

For those who don't remember, through this blog, I was providing the only videos of the city council meetings and planning commission meetings. 

I still can recall when a resident asked that the meetings be livestreamed during a public comment, and the response from one of the council members of that era was, "Joseph uploads the videos."

That was fun, but not what a 21st-century city should have been satisfied with.

The powerbrokers of those years made it a point to have some form of livestream up before my first meeting. 

3) Regular Town Hall Meetings 2019
This was a campaign goal of mine, and I can say that it was satisfied very early on with the Chamber's coffee with the city events. 

Though not as I'd originally envisioned, I had suggested quarterly town halls, being that this is a monthly event, it satisfies the aim. 

4) Cannabis Ordinance 2021

This was easily the most controversial item the city has dealt with in its history. It's a shame that it happened during the covid era, when the meetings were conducted on Zoom. 

As of May of 2025, the city has brought in $5,939,310 through cannabis retailers 

That's a lot of money for a small budget city like Wildomar, and I'm proud to say I didn't let my personal opinions get in the way. 

Despite never having tried it myself (and still advising others against it), I wasn't about to stand in the way of a legal product or the tax revenue it brings in.

Here is a link from 2019 that goes over my views at the time, which still hold true in 2026, on this issue.

5) 20 Acre Parkland Purchase 2023

I remember being on a Zoom call with the former city manager when this was first a topic. 

From the word go, I pushed for Wildomar to find a way to purchase this land from the lovely ladies who've long operated Anne Sullivan Preschool. 

They offered it to the city for about $2m. Their next option was to sell it to a developer and essentially add to the Windsong Valley area by another 80-ish houses. 

This still unnamed park is located directly off Palomar, just south of Anne Sullivan Preschool.

Though I wish it had already been opened to the public a year ago, the fact that this bit of land is going to stay in its natural state, and open to the public, will always be counted as one of my biggest accomplishments as a member of the Wildomar City Council.

6) Backer Of The CR&R Contract

This caused some angst among the community when it came through, and I was included in that group initially, primarily over the length of the contract (twenty years), which, as we found out, is the norm these days. 

In the end, after our legal team had finished negotiating the deal, the city had a much better deal than before. 

Link to blog covering the special meeting

7) Sign Ordinance 2019

I'm known as the anti-sign guy among my colleagues and members of WBV. 

One of the first things I pushed for was to create a robust ordinance regarding illegal/bootleg signs either erected in the public right of way or attached to roadside poles. 

For some, they may not appreciate the difference from then to now (out of sight, out of mind), but all you have to do is drive into our sister city to the north and see what unchecked signs actually do to the feel of an area. 

The light at Inland Valley Drive and Clinton Keith used to showcase an endless array of signs. Yes, every election cycle the problem crops back up, protected by the First Amendment, but there is a narrow window in which they're allowed to remain up. Look for WBV to remove those after we hit the "10 day after the election" mark.

Over the years, I've personally removed thousands of signs, delivering them to "sign jail." To this day, I don't believe anyone has come to bail out their signs or banners.

8) Beefed Up Code Enforcement (remember those junk haulers on Palomar?)

When I first ran for office in 2018, expanding code enforcement was a key part of my campaign. I'm pleased to report that we've grown from a single officer to a team of four full-time Code Enforcement Officers, plus a part-time officer as well.

9) Monthly Newsletter From The City

Though I envisioned something more closely resembling what former County Supervisor Kevin Jeffries would put out monthly, I'm happy to know that the city has had a monthly newsletter for many years now. 

This was one of my initial campaign pledges.

10) Helped Establish WBV (Wildomar Beautification Volunteers)

I'm so fortunate to be associated with Bridgette Moore. 

Over the years, we've been friends, frenemies, colleagues, but always stalwarts for the community of Wildomar. Though I can readily admit that she is the dynamo that others draw energy from. 

Back during the Summer of 2020, she asked if I'd go pick up trash with her on McVicar. I'd already been going out periodically, picking up trash or otherwise, beautifying the area.

Here's me (pre WBV) removing graffiti on the dumpster behind the old tamale shop across from Wildomar Elementary School.

In fact, the very first time I met her, I was out picking up litter with Kevin Jon Sax out where the Brown House used to stand (basically where the parking lot of Kaiser is today). 

The official first WBV pic. 
(Weren't we cute in our masks... outdoors no less?)

Fast forward nearly six years, and WBV has accomplished many great things, with hundreds of volunteers over the years.

Though I'm grateful each time Bridgette points to me, saying "We created WBV," the facts are that without her doggedness and inner strength, WBV would have never been a fraction of what it is today. 

In 2022, WBV was recognized as the volunteer group of the year by the county. 

Say Cheese!

Posing on the steps of the county building.

11) Haven't Missed A Single Meeting

I was looking back, and the only city council meeting I've missed was a couple of years before being elected to the city council, the day my wife got news that her mother had died. 

I've never missed a meeting since being elected in 2018

That streak had stayed intact, for ALL the meetings I represent Wildomar at... until just last month when I was in Sacramento (representing Wildomar) at a League of California Cities event. That was at the same time as a T-Now meeting, something I'd never missed since my first meeting back in 2015. 

12) Blocked Smoke Shop, Which Opened The Door For Montague Brothers Coffee 2019

This was on its way before I alerted the community with a blog in May of 2019.

In short, as an old business was leaving, before Montague Bros, a smoke shop leased the building, and were already putting in fixtures and displays (that would have been one horrendous blot on the character of the neighborhood). 

I blogged about it, got the residents involved, and the rest was history.

Here's a link to the blog if you want to go down memory lane: https://wildomarrap.blogspot.com/2019/05/goodbye-day-spa-hello-smoke-shop.html

In addition to those items... I've proudly represented Wildomar on various countywide boards and commissions. 

 
RCA 2019 to present (on the executive committee for the past two years).

RCHCA since 2019 (been the chair at least twice).

RCTC from 2023 to present (member of the subcommittee WRCP&P for three years, chair in 2025)

SCAG 2023 to present.

WRCOG 2023 through 2025 (was on the Admin and Finance committee for two years)

Bridgette Moore's understudy on RTA, and she's allowed me to be the regular attendee of T-NOW since my first day on council.

The above doesn't include the dozens of emails from residents I receive each month, seeking help with various issues in town. 

I've happily met with hundreds of residents over the last eight years. Simple meetings from locations such as a local establishment to their homes, or a more formal meeting with staff at city hall. 

What I have further to accomplish 

The voters first elected me in 2018 with 57% of the vote, then in 2022, I was stunned to see it went up to 71% in a reelection bid. 

I work for you, and though I'm not the most well-spoken, I'm willing to get in there and mix it up on your behalf just the same. 

You've allowed me to learn over these eight years; I still have the energy and the passion to seek another term, and you're going to want a proven champion in your corner during critical times.

Wildomar's rep at RCTC (Riverside County Transportation Commission) as we toured the 91-71 flyover before it was opened to the public.

With the inclusion of cannabis tax dollars in the city coffers ($6M through 2025) and the anticipated increases in revenue from Walmart, Sprouts, the hotel, and a handful of smaller businesses about to come online, I'll be your proven fiscally conservative voice on the council.

Speaking of 'wants', you're going to want me to be on your city council as these new monies come rolling in, pushing to have it applied to the community (public safety/roads/parks) and not directed towards city hall. 

This was the first campaign image I created for my 2018 city council run.

If you have questions about my campaign, please use my non-city email:

josephmorabito2018@gmail.com

If you have questions, concerns, thoughts, comments, or ideas about Wildomar, use my city email:
jmorabito@wildomar.gov

If you want to run against me, here is a link to the city's website that gives you all the information.

November 3, 2026 General Municipal Election | Wildomar, CA