Serving Gogebic, Iron and Ontonagon Counties
Serving Gogebic, Iron and Ontonagon Counties
By RICHARD JENKINS
MERCER, Wis — The parties involved in the contested election for District 11 representing Mercer on the Iron County Board of Supervisors met Wednesday morning to make sure everyone was on the same page.
In the April 5 election, John Sendra beat incumbent Victor Ouimette 109 votes to 105 to win the seat on the county board. However, issues arose during the election when an unknown number of voters received ballots for District 12’s county board seat — a race where Opal Roberts was running for re-election unopposed. Both districts voted in the same Mercer polling place.
Wednesday’s meeting included Sendra, Ouimette, Iron County Clerk Michael Saari and Mercer election officials.
The meeting began with Saari confirming Tuesday’s canvass, which certifies the election’s result, didn’t impact the final tallies and reviewing what the options were going forward.
As the election’s loser, Saari said Ouimette has the option of demanding a recount since he only lost by four votes. State law gives Ouimette three days following the canvass to request a recount, making 5 p.m. Friday his deadline.
While a recount is normally a required step before any alternative action is taken regarding contested elections, Saari said state law does provide a way for the recount to be skipped.
Under state law, if both sides stipulate the recount is unlikely to change the outcome of the race — as there were issues with the election that wouldn’t be resolved by simply counting the ballots again, such as the wrong ballots were given to voters — a recount could be skipped and Ouimette could appeal to Iron County Circuit Court Judge Patrick Madden that the election was so flawed the only course of action is to revote.
If Madden agreed with the argument, he could order a special election just for District 11 voters to decide who sits on the county board.
If both sides fail to agree to the stipulation, Ouimette can still appeal to Madden following the recount.
Sendra said his attorney has advised him, as the election’s winner, that he gains nothing by conceding to the stipulation that allows the recount to be skipped.
Sendra also said that, as the burden of proof in a hypothetical court case lies with the candidate who lost the election, Ouimette had an uphill battle.
“The point becomes very simply, ‘how do you prove what was lost?’ and everything becomes a reasonable guess in the courts. So if there are votes that are missed, first we have to identify how many were missed. We don’t know that for a fact, I mean people may have voted for one reason or another, there is no way to identify it. Which way would they have voted (would also have to be established), the courts will apportion it 50/50, because there’s no way to identify (this), so the reasonable way to do it is (split them evenly),” Sendra said, pointing out splitting the votes keeps the result the same.
Sendra also argued that looking at the district’s voting results in the town board vote — where both Sendra and Ouimette also appeared as two of the four candidates on the ballot — he had a larger margin of victory than in the county board race and this could possibly be interpreted as an indication the voters with the wrong ballots could have broken to Sendra’s advantage.
Ouimette declined to make a decision regarding the recount at the meeting.
“I may very well (request a recount or press for a special election), because it is my legal right to do that,” Ouimette said. “But I am not making that decision right now, I’ve got until Friday to do that.”
If the election’s result hasn’t been resolved by the county board’s April 19 meeting when the new board is sworn in, Saari told the Daily Globe the seat would simply be left vacant until the winner is determined.
In addition to a discussion of how the candidates could proceed, the way the error happened and what could be done to prevent the issue in future elections was also discussed.
It was agreed it was clearly an issue of human error and was likely caused by the fact the supervisor race appeared on the same sheet of paper as the state supreme court justice and the state court of appeals races.
It appears those putting the ballots together — voters received several pieces of paper as they were voting in their respective party’s presidential primary, the town board race, county board/judicial races and a school board election — were possibly looking at the judicial races and forgot the ballots had differences.
Mercer Town Clerk Christan Brandt said the town has since learned they could assemble the ballots and write the district/ward number on the ballots ahead of time. This will be done in the future, giving workers more time to assemble the ballots and an opportunity to ensure mistakes weren’t made.
“From here on out, then myself (and the election workers) will ahead of time come in, make sure those ward numbers are on the precise (ballots),” Brandt said. “This way it will hopefully eliminate some form of error.”
