Kyle Ward has managed to retain his narrow hold over the third available seat on the Alamance-Burlington school board now that the local board of elections has posted the final results from last Tuesday’s vote.
This certified count, which received the blessing of Alamance County’s board of elections on Friday, puts Ward just 10 votes ahead of Brandy Whittaker, who finished fourth in this year’s seven-way race for the three seats on the school board. Whittaker had previously found herself within 3 votes of Ward’s third-place finish only to fall further behind due to some eleventh-hour adjustments to the vote count on Friday.
The final vote tally also puts Republican Ryan Moffitt 286 votes behind Democrat Ian Baltutis in the race for the legislative seat that represents the 63rd district in North Carolina’s state house.
In both of these instances, the trailing candidate has the right to call for a recount under state law, which permits this option whenever the margin of difference in a non-statewide race is less than 1 percent of all the votes cast in that contest. Any candidate who wishes to request a recount must do so in writing before 5:00 p.m. on Monday, November 16.
The vote totals subject to a potential recount have already been double-checked by the county’s bipartisan board of elections, which met for over two hours on Friday to confirm the election’s results.
Before the local board of elections could certify the election’s results, it had to address issues with 10 ballots that had come under scrutiny since they were first entered into the preliminary tally.
The first two issues concerned people who had voted early only to pass away before the date of the election. In both cases, the county’s election director had flagged these ballots after receiving death notices for the two voters. The five-member board agreed to sustain both of the director’s challenges and remove each voter’s selections from the election’s results.
The board’s members took the same tack with two people who were outed as active felons after casting early ballots in the elections. Since neither of these two individuals had turned up to defend the validity of their votes, the board unanimously agreed to discard their selections.
The board then turned its attention to six people who had failed to complete the same-day-registration process that was available to eligible voters during the state’s early voting period. These six individuals had until 11:00 a.m. on Friday to complete the process, and their failure to do so cleared the way for the elections board to toss out their ballots.
The county’s election staff went on to manually delete the selections from these 10 discarded ballots. The board of elections then broke up to bipartisan teams to double check the vote totals for each of the county’s electoral precincts.
After the completion of this so-called “canvassing” process, the election staff updated the vote tally, which had previously been adjusted on Tuesday to include 357 provisional and mail-in absentee ballots that had been set aside for further review on the night of the election. The 10 ballots that were deleted from the vote totals on Friday failed to give Whittaker the bump that she needed to dislodge Ward from his third-place slot in this year’s school board race.
According to the certified tally, Whittaker remains in fourth place with 24,347 votes, while Ward has secured the third seat up for grabs on the school board with 24,357 votes.
