Recount Friday for Rosalia; election stands stand

Gazette Reporters

Ballots will be recounted by hand to determine a winner in the race for seat 2 on the Rosalia Town Council.

Challenger Rick Lau still leads incumbent Bob Hill by one vote, 112 to 111, in the finalized count by Whitman County’s elections department.

Auditor Eunice Coker said the recount will be done in the elections office at 10 a.m. Friday.

State law mandates a recount if the difference between the two candidates is less one-half of one percent of the total number of votes cast for both candidates.

The recount was officially triggered after the county canvass board met Monday and Tuesday to certify results of the Nov. 8 election. None of the final ballots approved by the canvass board applied to the Rosalia Council race.

Coker said state law calls for a machine recount, but elections staff opted for a hand recount. Elections Supervisor Debbie Hooper said the high number of write-in votes for position 4 on the Rosalia school board would make a machine recount difficult. The tabulating machines stop when they come across write-in ballots.

“And hand recounts - they’re precise,” said Coker, who estimated the recount would take about an hour.

Lau posted a 82 to 72 lead after the initial election night count, but Hill closed the gap in subsequent counts of ballots that arrived at the elections office after the election night tally.

Hooper said 245 ballots were flagged for review by the canvass board.

In other close races, Randy Crowner was re-elected Mayor of Albion, Rachell Anderson and Nancy Anderson won tight spots on the Endicott School Board and Kurt Kimberling won a close race over Nikkie Pfaff for commissioner in the Garfield Hospital District.

Farmington’s three levy requests failed to reach 60 percent approval, the only small taxing district funding rejection in the election returns.

The canvass board consisted of Hooper, Coker, County Commissioner Greg Partch and Prosecutor Denis Tracy. They rejected 122 questionable ballots, including 16 without signatures; 46 with illegible signatures; 45 that were postmarked too late; two non-registered provisional ballots, and 13 for miscellaneous reasons, most of which, Hooper said, had the identification labels ripped off.

Voter turnout was 53 percent.

Hooper said total cost of the election was nearly $65,000. The bulk of that cost, almost $27,000, was for maintenance and computer chips in the tabulating machines. Another $10,000 was charged the county by the state for maintaining a voter database.

Ballots cost $6,373, with envelopes costing just under $6,000. Wages for election workers totaled $9,400, which covered the entire election from ballot preparation to tabulation. Postage costs were $3,000.

A portion of the election cost is billed out to the participating districts according to the number of voters registered in each district.

Hooper added $5,719 of the election bill was spent on maintenance for the disabled voter machine in the county elections office. That machine has not been used since 2005, she said.