A recount in the race for Graham’s city council didn’t do anything at all to nudge the final vote tally in this four-way competition for two of the council’s five seats.
By the time the votes were recalculated on Wednesday evening, the second-place finisher Jim Young was still 14 votes ahead of Randy Phillips, who had called for the recount on Monday after a certified vote count on Friday showed him a close third in the race for the council’s two available seats.
Under state law, the first runner-up in a multi-seat municipal race can demand a recount if the margin between them and the next highest vote getter is less than 1 percent of the total ballots cast for both of these candidates. The race for Graham’s city council was the only contest in Alamance County that met this statutory criteria due to the relatively narrow margin of difference between Phillips and Young.
The 14 vote spread that the elections office reported on Friday was even tighter than the preliminary tally on Election Night, which put Phillips 17 votes behind Young.
According to the elections office, the subsequent change in the vote count was due, in part, to provisional ballots cast on Election Day by people who showed up to vote in the wrong precinct. The elections office vetted these ballots after the election and adjusted the vote count to reflect those deemed acceptable.
The local elections office had scheduled the recount for 5:30 p.m. on Wednesday in order to comply with a state-level requirement that demands the new tally within three days of the candidate’s request. The county’s elections staff didn’t actually kick off the recount until 5:47 p.m. after it received state level clearance to proceed with just two members of the county’s five-person elections board. The two members on hand were Republicans Kevin Harrison and Ben York. Absent that afternoon was fellow Republican Gary Jackson as well as Democrats Homer Ashby and Elaine Berry.
It ultimately took the county’s elections staff more than three hours to retabulate all 2,431 of the ballots cast in the race for Graham’s city council.
Things initially moved at a fairly brisk clip as the staff ran through the1,521 “full-face” ballots, which included those cast on Election Day, along with a smattering of mail-in absentee and provisional votes.
Things nevertheless slowed to crawl when the staff turned to the 888 ballots cast during early voting, which had to be individually fed into the only tabulating machine certified for use in the elections office. The final step in the recount was the tabulation of another 22 curbside ballots that disabled voters had cast in this race.
In the end, the staff had a final vote count at 8:55 p.m. that confirmed Young’s election to the second of the council’s two available seats.
These figures were identical to the pre-recount tally from Friday, which had incumbent councilman Bobby Chin in first place with 1,161 votes, Young in second place with 1,105 votes, Phillips in third with 1,091, Daniel Alvis in fourth with 924, and 34 cast for various write-in candidates.
