As difficult as this would have been to believe on Election Night, the counting of the final 446 votes to decide the race for the second City Council seat may begin sometime after 4 o’clock on Friday afternoon at City Hall.
The schedule is highly tentative, the City Clerk’s office points out.
The timetable is linked to numerous variables involving the County Registrar’s office in Norwalk and City Hall.
According to the City Clerk’s office, it could be as late as Monday before it is known whether Jeff Cooper, declared the early winner (prematurely, it turns out), or Meghan Sahli-Wells will be seated with Tuesday’s Other Winner, incumbent Scott Malsin, at the Monday, April 26, Council meeting.
City Clerk Martin Cole, who has been cast into a center stage role the past two days, said the scheduled Friday afternoon count was dictated by the Election Code, which requires 48 hours’ notice to a community before a vote count.
Mr. Cole said that beginning at 4 o’clock, the mail-in votes and provisional ballots “eligible to be counted will be processed by the Board of Elections. Beginning at 5 (or as soon thereafter as needed to finish the processing), the votes will be counted and the unofficial results of that count will be posted.”
Mr. Cole said the 4 o’clock notice “is provided to allow for the earliest possible counting of the votes,” given the Election Code requirement.
Further, City Hall’s plans “assume that the Registrar/Recorder completes the signature verifications no later than 2 p.m. on Friday (to allow time for my office to obtain the results of that process. While considered unlikely, in case the signature verification by the Registrar/Recorder is not completed by that time, no votes will be counted on Friday. If necessary, an announcement to that effect will be made in Council Chambers at 4 p.m.”
Mr. Cole said that his goal is “to complete counting of all eligible ballots in one counting session.”
And so, an evidently tidy and formful hometown election has suddenly and mercurially evolved into a heart-thumping drama that surely is robbing the candidates of peace of mind for another day and a half.
Whenever Mr. Cole announces the final tabulation, if the trailing candidate emerges first, this probably would be stamped the most spectacular election turnaround in the modern era.
In a contest that has been tantalizingly taut from the start, Mr. Cooper holds a 42-vote lead, 2,279 to 2,237. But the psychological edge no doubt belongs to Ms. Sahli-Wells. She thought she had lost — only to discover on the day after that the number of outstanding votes, first reported to be few, actually were 10 times the margin of difference between the two candidates.
If you are grasping for hopeful, perhaps even meaningless, clues, try this one:
Mr. Cooper and Ms. Sahli-Wells finished in a virtual flatfooted tie at the end of the mail-in vote count. He had 974, she, 973. (By comparison, Mr. Malsin stood at 1,188 and Robert Zirgulis attracted 397.)
A Changing Number
On Election Night in Council Chambers, after the counting was concluded, it was (erroneously) indicated that only140 mail-in and provisional ballots remained to be counted. That number did not arouse any overt concern, in Council Chambers, that it could affect the outcome.
Why were they not included in the original count?
Because all mail-ins and provisionals — actually, photo copies of the signed envelopes containing the ballots — must be forwarded first to the County Registrar’s office in Norwalk for verification and then returned to Culver City.
The spotlighted 446, 354 mail-in ballots and 92 provisionals, arrived at City Hall too late to make the roundtrip to Norwalk and be included with the 3,432 vote-by-mail ballots that were tabulated.
At the risk of wading too deeply into the analytical weeds, the two precincts where each candidate fared best, offer the most ballots still to be counted, 58 in a precinct Ms. Sahli-Wells won 166 to 96, and 53 in a precinct Mr. Cooper won 200 to181.
To Mr. Cooper’s credit on Election Night, even as he was bubbling over with the joy of victory in his mid-town home, surrounded by radiating supporters, he cautioned them that some counting remained to be completed.
To certain ears, that may have sounded like a gracious throwaway line. On the day after, though, it became a big deal.
On Election Night, no one knew how many ballots were outstanding. In fact, not even Mr. Cole’s office knew until yesterday afternoon.
