By Terry Witt – Spotlight Senior Reporter
City and county officials on the Bronson Canvassing Board will meet at 10 a.m., Friday at the Dogan Cobb Municipal Building to certify the results of Tuesday’s town election.
The preliminary results show Sherrie Schuler defeated Allen E. Alexander 123-111 to win the District 3 seat while incumbent Town Councilman Robert Partin defeated Mark Kjeseth 155-69 to keep his District 1 seat.
The Bronson Canvassing Board will hand count one of the races. Supervisor of Elections Tammy Jones said one of the races will be drawn from a hat to determine which race is counted.
She said the hand count, known as an audit, is to certify that the machine count was accurate. Even though the Schuler/Alexander race ended with Schuler winning by 11 votes, or 4 percent more than Alexander, it won’t necessarily be the race that is hand-counted.
Jones said Town Manager Sue Beaudet and Deputy Clerk Wendy Maragh checked the signatures on the exterior ballot of the absentees to make sure the signatures matched what was on the list of registered voters in Bronson. They handled the signature checks in Town Hall before the absentees were given to the canvassing board to be opened and counted Tuesday night.
Beaudet, the person in charge of the town election, had been given a paper copy of the list of registered Bronson voters and their signatures by the county elections office. The town was in charge of its own election. The absentee ballots were opened by County Judge James T. Browning. He handed the opened ballot to Maragh when she returned from whatever she was doing. She handed the opened absentees to County Commissioner John Meeks who handed them to Jones to insert in the vote-counting machine.
Any of the candidates can challenge the election results. They have a right to ask to view the signatures on the absentee exterior envelopes. They would have to contact Beaudet to get access to the exterior ballot envelopes bearing the voter signatures and arrange for a time to view them, according to Jones. There were 89 absentees.
The audit on Friday isn’t a recount. The only time a recount is done is when the vote totals separating candidates is one-half of one percent. That wasn’t the case with Schuler and Alexander. Schuler won by 4 percent.
The Town of Bronson must retain the absentee and machine voting records for 22 months. Candidates have 10 days to challenge the election results.
One of the oddities for absentee voters Tuesday was that they couldn’t turn in their absentees at Dogan Cobb Municipal Building where the machine voting was taking place. They were required to turn them in a Town Hall. Jones said that is a requirement of state law.
Jones said the reason election officials know that the absentee ballots were filled out by a registered voter living within the city limits of Bronson is because only registered voters from Bronson could request an absentee ballot for the town election. Absentee (mail-in) voters are required to sign the exterior ballot. The signature on the ballot must match the signature on the voter registration roll.
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Enterprise Reporting by Terry Witt September 15, 2021; Posted September 15, 2021
