Recount cements Kvalheim win

MAT-SU -- Ten days after the election was held for the Mat-Su Borough Assembly District 4 seat, Mary Kvalheim was declared the unofficial winner in the race. The race is scheduled to be certified Tuesday at 6 p.m., with her first meeting as a sworn-in assembly member to follow.

The borough's five-member municipal election counting team met for five hours Friday to recount the ballots in five of the eight precincts that voted in the district race. The recount was held at District 4 candidate Pat Marley's request, filed Tuesday afternoon. At the end of the day, Kvalheim won the race with nine votes.

Kvalheim said she was relieved to see an end to the race.

"It's been a part of my life that I thought was going to be over on election night," Kvalheim said.

When the counting team set about their duties, they did so methodically. Each precinct was handled in groups of 25 ballots. Five ballots were counted, then tallied and set aside in separated stacks. The results were reviewed after each 25-ballot group was finished.

Over the course of the hand-count, the final vote tally changed by three. According to the canvassing board and counting team chair Gerry Keeling, the three changes could be attributed to voter error.

She explained that one election-day ballot had been marked too lightly for the Accu-Vote ballot tallying machine to read.

"They didn't use a ballot pen," Keeling said, as one explanation of why the marking was light.

The same mistake was found later with an absentee ballot, Keeling said. The third vote was simply a matter of an incomplete ballot. A voter, Keeling said, had filled in the oval for a write-in candidate, but left blank the space available to write in the alternative candidate choice.

One of the lightly filled-in votes was added to Kvalheim's tally, giving her a total of 485 votes to Marley's 476.

Overall, although Marley said he objected to the large deposit it took for him to launch the recount, but both candidates said the board handled the recount well. The two candidates, along with one supporter each, spent much of the day in the borough's first floor conference room watching the recount.

"I'm satisfied that it was all good," Marley said. "I got what I asked for."

"It was a very long, drawn out, but very precise process," Kvalheim said. "It's amazing the detail they go through."

Both candidates agreed that their race, although it represented two opposing views in a heated Valley issue, was well-run.

"Pat congratulated me -- he was very gracious," Kvalheim said. "I think he ran a good race."

Marley said he had no hard feelings with the way the race turned out. He said he could have handled his race differently, but felt the two candidates had developed a rapport.

"I feel I've developed a better relationship with Mary Kvalheim," Marley said. "You live and learn and go on. As far as I'm concerned, it's a battle of ideas that's been going on from the beginning. You don't give up; you fight the battle you believe in."

Marley said he would continue to pay attention to what's going on at the assembly level and, if necessary, would be at the meetings to offer his testimony.

"I've been involved for the past two years," Marley said. "Every time someone comes up with new regulations to restrict my property rights, I'll be down there to testify."