In the Fullerton City Council ballot count, Jan Flory is now up by 32 votes. Our sources tell us that the number of remaining ballots is small (less than 20 damaged ballots) and insufficient to change the result. Counting will officially be wrapped up by Wednesday, if not before. Current results give Jan Flory 12,828 votes to Travis Kiger’s 12,796.
The closeness of the race will likely lead to a recount funded by Kiger’s benefactor, Fullerton businessman Tony Bushala. It is however not very likely that a recount will be successful in changing the final result enough to assure a Kiger victory. The last time a recount resulted in a change in election result, that we recall, was the 2007 First Supervisor Special Election where Janet Nguyen flipped Trung Nguyen’s 7 vote lead into a 7 vote lead for herself.
It took a switch of 28 votes to flip the 2007 first District Special Election in Nguyen’s favor. In Nguyen’s contest there were ten candidates and each voter could only vote for one candidate. In the Fullerton contest, there are twelve candidates and each voter could vote for up to three candidates. It is going to be a lot tougher for Kiger to gain the 17 votes needed to eke out a one point victory.
In addition, Greg Diamond over at Orange Juice Blog points out:
If there were no challenges to provisionals, there apparently would have been no need to segregate the challenged provisional ballots. They’ve been opened, counted, and mixed with the others. There’s no longer an opportunity to suck them out of the pile and exclude those votes. That means that a recount would be solely over open and anonymous ballots that had already been cast — offering very little to fight about. A court is less likely to respond to a motion where the movant can cherry pick which ballots to exclude already knowing how those ballots were cast. Kiger’s only hope would be that the ROV somehow flat out miscounted.
But, if Tony Bushala wants to shell out thousands of dollars for a recount, he’s free to make what appears to me to be a rather poor investment decision.
What Travis sang in his shower this morning?