Recounts affirm earlier results

An official recount last week affirmed Deanna Osborn's one-vote election victory over Wesley Brian Cox for the second and final seat on Logan Village Board.

A recount also confirmed Dale Bone's five-vote victory in the Nov. 7 election over Brian Watson for the second and final seat on the San Jon school board.

In the end, Osborn's 122 votes prevailed over Cox's 121 votes for the Logan village seat - the same total recorded on Election Day. Cox had been appointed to the board in the late spring after the departure of Leslie Osborn.

Deanna Osborn, who watched the recount at the 10th Judicial Circuit courtroom on Wednesday morning, said she felt "really good" moments after her victory was affirmed.

"I feel really good about working with the village council that we have now," she said. "I think we have a great mayor, a great village manager now. I think we'll see a lot of positives in Logan."

Osborn praised what she saw from the Quay County Clerk's Office during the recounts.

"I will tell you I will give a high thumbs-up our county clerk and her crew that did this," Osborn said. "Applause to the crew that does that because they made sure that everything was top-notch."

Osborn, former chairwoman of the Republican Party of Quay County, said she held high confidence in local election officials before the recount.

"This just confirmed it, watching them today," she said.

Cox, reached by phone on Friday, indicated he wasn't too disappointed by the recount's outcome.

"I was already behind, so this just confirms it," he said. "I don't dwell on it. I know Deanna will do great things for Logan.

"I was glad to be on the council for a few months. It was a good experience," he said, adding he might run for the village board in the next election in two years.

TJ Smith captured the other seat on the Logan Village Board, with 142 votes.

After the recount of the San Jon race, those results also were unchanged, with Bone totaling 61 votes to Watson's 56. Bone and Watson both were incumbents on the school board.

Election officials acknowledged before the recount that a change in the San Jon outcome was unlikely because of the bigger vote margin and the relatively few ballots cast in that race.

Eddie Ray Behrends, a newcomer, captured the other San Jon school board seat with 63 votes.

The State Canvass Board ordered the recounts on both races in late November. Recounts are required if the margin is five votes or fewer or less than 1%.

The canvass board also ordered a random voting system check - one of many statewide - for three races in Tucumcari's Precinct 10. Those recounts also affirmed the results from the November election, with no change in totals.

The recounts weren't without complications. The recounts of the Logan and San Jon races required more than three hours. County Clerk Ellen White had estimated it would take two.

The recount of the Logan race went relatively smoothly, requiring about an hour. However, election officials initially couldn't find two ballots from the San Jon race on Wednesday.

White said the two ballots - both absentee - were found Thursday morning.

"The canvassing board reconvened with the judge, and we added to the two additional ballots," White said. "All the totals are exactly the same as Election Day."

White explained why the San Jon recount was more complicated.

"It's because their school district has so many precincts in it," White said. "People almost to Logan are in the San Jon school district. There weren't that many ballots, but they were in several ballot boxes in so many different areas."

Five election officials and District Judge Albert Mitchell Jr. oversaw the recounts. They began with hand recounts of the first 100 ballots of each race. They looked at 10 ballots at a time. Sometimes those 10 ballots were recounted three or four times because of momentary confusion or discrepancies between judges.

A few people have advocated for hand-counting of all elections. Mitchell said if that happened in Quay County, it would take three days to complete final results.

With machines doing the counting, the county typically has final results within an hour after the polls close.

"If people think doing a hand count with people who are exhausted at the end of the day is a better count than the machine, they should have been there yesterday," White said Thursday. "Humans make errors. Those machines don't make errors."

If no discrepancies were found in the hand counts of the first 100 ballots, the rest of them were counted by machine.

White said she was satisfied with what the recounts revealed.

"The voting machines work properly and count the ballots properly," she said. "After three hand counts in three different areas, the results not changing should send a message to voters that their ballots are cast properly."

Election officials found a few ballots where voters didn't quite follow the instructions.

One voter not only filled in the ovals next to candidates' names, but he or she also inexplicably marked out the names with the marker, as well.

Instead of filling in the oval, one voter wrote an "X" in the oval. Another voter failed to completely fill in the oval. Those two examples could lead to the ballots not being read by the machine.

"It's human error. It ain't machine error," voting machine technician Danny Wallace said.