Written by Paul Dail
While the winning candidates have already held their celebrations, the final word on the 2014 Washington County election wasn’t official until the Washington County Clerk’s office released the certified results on Tuesday, two weeks after Election Day.
According to Melanie Abplanalp, the difference between preliminary and certified results comes down to absentee ballots for those unable to get to a polling center and provisional ballots, those which are collected when a voter shows up at a polling location but isn’t in the official register book, which is what Tuesday’s certified counts represented.
“They [absentee ballots] can be postmarked the Monday prior to Election Day,” Abplanalp said, “but as a county, we stop counting them on the Friday before the election. Then once we have taken care of Election Day and have the polling in our system, we go in and process any outstanding absentee ballots and any others that come in, such as provisional ballots.”
Abplanalp said there is a misconception that if a candidate is leading by a landslide, they quit counting, but she said that’s not the case.
Even given those extra ballots, the results didn’t change who won or lost in this race.
Proposition 3, which passed by a slim margin in the election day count, saw it’s lead narrow slightly in the official tally, it’s lead dropping from 644 votes to just 623, passing by only 1.04 percent.
While most percentages for the County Commissioner and House District seats were consistent with the preliminary results, the numbers shifted slightly in Republican incumbent Don Ipson’s favor. Ipson ended up with just over 65 percent of the vote, and Independent American Party candidate Nihla Judd, the only third-party candidate running locally, took just over 20 percent, beating Democrat Cheryl Hawker by almost 6 percent.
