Commission race to be settled
March 27, 2008
The winner of the Democratic nomination for Athens County commissioner finally will be decided today.
The Athens County Board of Elections will begin the official count of the March 4 primary election at 10 a.m., and is expected to finish around 2 p.m. The board will then meet to approve the official count, and then the winners will be announced.
The provisional and absentee ballots that will be added to the total in the official count will help decide the race for the Democratic Party’s nomination for the county commissioner seat currently held by Bill Theisen, as well as in several central committee races in the county. Theisen, a Democrat, chose not to run for re-election.
In the race for the Democratic nomination for county commissioner, Charlie Adkins currently leads the field of seven candidates with 2,649 votes. Jim Pancake is close behind in second placed with 2,506 votes and has a chance to catch Adkins when the provisional and absentee votes are added to the final total. The next closest candidate is Doug Davis, who has 1,895 votes. It would be difficult, though technically not impossible, for Davis or any of the candidates who finished below him to make up the needed votes.
More than 2,300 votes still need to be counted from the March 4 election, so the vote total likely will change significantly. Not all of the 2,300 ballots left to be counted include votes for the Democratic primary race for county commissioner, however, as many of the ballots are likely Republican ballots, and some voters may have chosen not to vote in the commissioner race, no matter what party primary they voted in.
The ballots left to be counted include more than 400 absentee ballots and 1,900 provisional ballots.
Pancake, a former York Township trustee who won the Democratic Party’s nomination to represent the 92nd District in the Ohio House in 2002 (he lost to Republican Jimmy Stewart in the general election), performed well in the city of Athens and won more precincts than any other commissioner candidate in the unofficial count on March 4. Pancake won 25 of the 69 voting precincts in the county.
Albany resident Adkins, a former union president at Ohio University, won 22 precincts, several by wide margins.
The winner of the Democratic primary race will run against Republican nominee Larry Payne in the November general election. Payne, director of member services for the Athens Area Chamber of Commerce, defeated Joe Yanity III 1,641 to 1,250 in the Republican primary race for county commissioner. The results in this race are not expected to be affected by the addition of the provisional and absentee votes.
No other countywide races are expected to be affected by the provisional and absentee ballots, but several Democratic and Republican central committee races could change.
In the Democratic Central Committee races, Keller Blackburn leads Challie Abraham by just one vote, 39 to 38, in the Nelsonville 3-1 precinct, and Fredricka Shover leads Ginger Mender 105 to 97 in the Chauncey precinct.
The Republican Central Committee race for Glouster 1 is tied with Fred Cavey and Ralph Coey each having 12 votes, while the Republican Nelsonville 4-1 race is separated by just one vote, as Mary Ellen Hurd has 10 votes compared to Dennis Wolfe with nine votes.
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