Serving Gogebic, Iron and Ontonagon Counties
Serving Gogebic, Iron and Ontonagon Counties
By IAN MINIELLY
Bessemer — Terry Kryshak is unofficially in and Louis Miskovich out in the Bessemer City Council race after 51 missing votes were located Thursday.
The unofficial results announced early Wednesday morning after Tuesday’s election for all five council seats had Miskovich earning a seat with the fifth most votes and Kryshak on the outside looking in, as the sixth highest vote-getter.
Upon further review Thursday, city officials discovered an error was made in tallying the votes and Kryshak was actually the third highest vote-getter, leap-frogging three places and pushing Miskovich out of office and into the sixth position.
Eleven people earned votes Tuesday.
“I can’t have hard feelings. He is a great guy to get on the council,” Miskovich told the Daily Globe Thursday afternoon about Kryshak. “If I had known Terry was going to run, I would not have run. I would have just supported him. The council will benefit from Terry.”
City clerk James Trudgeon said the process of tallying the hand-written results was complicated. It was an all-write-in election for city council because no one filed paperwork on time to get their names on the ballot.
Trudgeon said each variation of the spelling of a candidate’s name needed to be accounted for and the plan was to add all variations for a single candidate’s name together to determine his or her final vote tally.
During the nearly five-hour counting process, an entire set of votes — 51 of them — for a particular spelling of Kryshak’s name was accidentally not added to his total.
Trudgeon said some of the candidates had more than 10 variations to the spellings of their names.
When the missing set of Kryshak votes was included in his tally, he jumped from sixth to third place, pushing Miskovich out of office.
“I said upfront I would abide by what the voters wanted,” Kryshak said Thursday. “I will serve with pride and do my best. I feel it is important to give people a chance to talk and discuss things before the council votes. That would be the biggest change I would like to see.”
The new council with their still unofficial vote totals includes: Adam Zak, 309; Allen Archie, 290; Kryshak, 273; incumbent Rob Coleman, 268; and incumbent Linda Nelson, 237.
Others receiving votes included: Miskovich, 235; Bill McDonald, 149; Jim Prezkop, 88; Richard Duncanson, 87; Jim Slagerman, 85, and Susanne Brown, 79.
The board of canvassers meets Monday to certify the election and make it official.
The new members of the city council will meet Monday at 5:30 p.m. to be sworn in and to elect a new mayor and mayor pro-tempore. Traditionally the mayor and mayor pro-tempore positions go to the highest and second-highest vote-getters, but it is not a requirement.
The board will also adopt rules of conduct and select a new city attorney, as Mike Korpela resigned.
