From Staff Reports

Election officials will recount votes in a close City Council election by hand after Councilman Bryan Freeborn requested a second recount.

Freeborn lost the Nov. 6 election by a narrow margin to newcomer Bill Russell. After an electronic recount, officials announced last Friday that the gap between the two candidates had dropped by six votes, though the winners remained the same.

Freeborn, who was appointed to fill the vacancy on council left when Terry Bellamy was elected mayor, had requested the first recount after losing his council seat by a margin of less that 80 votes.

Under state law, he was entitled to do so because the gap was less than 1 percent of the votes cast.
State law also allows him to request a hand recount of the votes in 3 percent of the precincts selected at random.

In the electronic recount, Freeborn gained five votes for a total of 5,510. Meanwhile, Russell lost one vote, giving him a total of 5,578, according to election officials.

Jan Davis, Brownie Newman and Russell won the most votes, with Freeborn, Dwight Butner and Elaine Lite trailing.

Trena Parker, director of the Buncombe County Board of Elections, said that such discrepancies between initial counts and recounts are not unusual.

Among the reasons for the discrepancy were a woman who inserted her ballot and her husbandís into the scanner at the same time, and another ballot that had not been rejected despite having too many candidates selected.

Officials did not say when the hand recount would begin, but noted that they would have to give the public 48 hoursí notice.

If the sample count shows a change in Freebornís favor, it could trigger a hand recount of all ballots. Election officials would do so if the sampleís results ó extrapolated out to all votes cast ó would change the results.