Recount ends, runoff begins
Clerk proposes March 27 for Mendoza, Richardson runoff

McKinley County Attorney Doug Decker calls out "Yes" or "No" to District Judge Lois DePauli Jr. during a ballot hand recount on Thursday afternoon at the Council Chambers inside City Hall. A ballot printing error caused the counting machines to ignore ballot Question 1 forcing a hand recount. [Photo by Matt Hinshaw/Independent]

By Zsombor Peter
Staff Writer

GALLUP — What a difference a day makes. Unfortunately for mayoral candidate Harry Mendoza, and fortunately for challenger Ralph Richards, it's not much.

After a full day of watching a canvassing board recount ballots from Tuesday's municipal elections some by hand, others by machine Mendoza and Richards ended up pretty much where they were Tuesday evening: in a runoff.

The City Council is meeting this morning at 11 to set a date. City Clerk Patricia Holland is proposing March 27.

Mendoza and Richards spent most of the day, from 8:30 in the morning until 5 in the afternoon, watching over the recount inside the City Council Chambers. After the last numbers were added up, the two men shook hands and parted ways.

"I'll see you in the runoff," said a relieved Richards.

Mendoza, understandably, was less enthused. With a handful of provisional ballots outstanding, he went to sleep Tuesday night and again Wednesday with 39.97 percent of the total votes cast in the mayor's race, just one vote shy of securing the 40 percent he needed to avoid a runoff.

The odds seemed to be in his favor.

And they seemed to stay that way for most of Thursday. Of the eight provisional ballots cast, half went to Mendoza. And even though he lost two of the votes he thought he had Tuesday, because the machines scanning the ballots jammed and added up more votes than they should have on a few occasions, Mendoza still finished Thursday with a total of two additional votes. Richards, who picked up none of the provisional ballots, actually lost a vote to the paper jams.

But the provisional ballots also increased the number of total votes cast for mayor. And when all the numbers were added up and divided, Mendoza ended up with an almost impossibly close 39.99 percent of the total.

Richards was a little confused. He did the math as well but came up with only 39.93 percent for Mendoza. That wasn't right. But even if it -were, it didn't change one simple fact.

"Either way you work it," Holland said, "you have a runoff by the very slimmest margin."

A little too slim for Mendoza. If he weren't so close to 40 percent, or if Richards, who ended up with 22.63 percent of the total votes cast for mayor, were closer, Mendoza said he'd be comfortable with a runoff. But considering how close he was, and how far behind Richard was, Mendoza didn't think one was necessary.

With technically less than a tenth of a vote keeping him from an outright victory, Mendoza said, "why go through all that expense?"

But the law is the law. The City Charter doesn't mention being close. It clearly states that if no one candidate receives a full 40 percent of the votes, the top two vote-getters must face off.

District 2 council candidate Roger Landovazo, meanwhile, who finished Tuesday just a few votes ahead of the 40-percent cutoff for a runoff, held on to his margin of victory by Thursday's end.

John Azua, who comfortably won the race for the council's District 4 seat Tuesday with nearly 48 percent of the votes, also held on to his victory.

None of that explains why the election's canvassing board spent all of Thursday recounting the ballots in the first place.

As it turned out, Question 1 on the ballot, which proposed raising the local minimum wage to $7.50 an hour, was missing the dollar figure in its Spanish version. The city caught the problem before Tuesday and ordered new ballots. But no one realized that the change ended up shifting the position of the ovals people were required to fill in to vote for or against the question. And because the machines the city was using to read the ballots weren't reprogrammed to detect the new positions of the ovals, they weren't counted.

City Attorney George Kozeliski said the change in the new ballots might also have affected the race for municipal judge, causing the machines to register some votes for incumbent Linda Padilla as votes for challenger Anthony Dimas and vice versa. It didn't. After the recount, Dimas still lost by about 200 votes.

However, the machines, reprogrammed to search for the ovals in their new locations, did find hundreds of new votes for Question 1. But they were still not enough to beat out Question 2, an alternative plan to raise the local minimum wage also to $7.50, but taking six months longer to get there and not mandating an annual increase proposed by the City Council and backed by the business community. That plan will start with an increase to $6.50 on July 1.