Election recount requested

MAT-SU -- It's back to the ballots for the Mat-Su Borough Canvassing Board, but borough voters should know by next week who will occupy the borough mayor's seat for the next three years.

Just six votes currently separate the top two candidates in the Mat-Su Mayor's race. Incumbent Tim Anderson currently has the lead, but mayoral candidate Charlie Fannon requested a recount Monday afternoon of all 33 borough voting precincts. Mat-Su Borough Clerk Sandy Dillon said Wednesday the borough's canvassing board would begin the recount Thursday, and will likely wrap up its count by today.

Fannon, in his request, said the margin is too small to be sure of a winner.

"Machine and/or human error in past elections has shown that it is both usual and customary for the ballot count to be off by approximately one vote per precinct," Fannon wrote. "The difference in this mayoral election is less than one-fifth of a vote per precinct. Six votes represent .00047 of the total votes cast. That is one-twentieth of one percent."

Fannon, when a telephone interview was requested, refused to comment on the matter.

"I don't want to have anything to do with the Frontiersman as long as they're going to shade their reporting," Fannon said. "I don't want to give information to the Frontiersman that I don't believe is going to be treated objectively."

In the 2002 borough election, five of eight Wasilla precincts were recounted to determine the race between Pat Marley and now-assembly member Mary Kvalheim. Kvalheim originally led by eight votes and, through a five-hour recount, three votes were found to have been miscounted in the five precincts, two of which weren't counted because the ovals were marked too lightly for the Accu-Vote machine to recognize. Kvalheim won the race by nine votes. Two votes were also of issue in the 2001 election race, where six votes separated candidates Sara Jansen and Kevin Sorensen. One ballot was apparently stuck to another, according to the canvassing board report at the time, and the second was an oval filled in too lightly for the machine to read.

Although the Accu-Vote machine reduces the likelihood of errors, Dillon said it doesn't eliminate them.

"It's as accurate as the voters follow the directions," Dillon said. "Voters are clearly instructed to fully fill in the oval and we give them a marking device. It's not a question of the unit, because I believe the unit is very accurate."

Dillon said despite the clear instructions and reminders from election officials to fill in ovals completely, ballots come back marked in pencil or red or green ink, which is difficult for the machine to read. Ballots, she said, are rejected if a voter has cast a double vote, but not if no votes register in a race. Many people, Dillon explained, don't cast a vote in every race on the ballot, so the machine won't be programmed to reject ballots for incompletion.

Dillon said three teams have been rounded up to hand-count the nearly 15,000 votes cast in the election. They began counting Thursday and should know by this afternoon whether the counting will extend into the weekend. Dillon said certification of the election is set for Monday at 6 p.m.

"It's a slow process, because you have to look at every ballot," Dillon said.