McGrew wins recount - for now One-third of ballots are 'under votes'

By RICHARD HANNERS

Whitefish Pilot

A recount of last week's Whitefish election added 232 ballots, which more or less lifted all candidates proportionately but changed the third-place winner in the city council election.

In the Nov. 7 recount, White-fish City-County Planning Board chairman Martin McGrew narrowly defeated former councilor Turner Askew by a 694-692 vote. Askew was ahead by four votes before the recount.

Askew asked for a recount Tuesday morning after the Flathead County commissioners canvassed the vote and signed off on the election. The recount is scheduled to take place on Monday, Nov. 19.

Because Askew's margin of defeat was less than a quarter of a percent, the county will pay for the recount, Flathead County election manager Monica Eisenzimer said.

But the recount may not cost taxpayers anything because county staff will do the work, she said.

Eisenzimer said it took about 30 people much of a day to recount last year's Ken Toole-Mike Taylor Public Service Commission race, she said. But the Whitefish election has much fewer ballots to count by hand.

The narrow race for the third Whitefish City Council seat has created uncertainty in the city's first-ever all-mail election, but one thing is generally accepted — Whitefish will have a new mayor.

According to the recount, Mike Jenson, a Whitefish native and former mayor, won the three-way mayoral race with 1,008 votes. Incumbent mayor Cris Coughlin received 745 votes and councilor Nick Palmer had 93 votes.

In the city council race, where seven candidates vied for three seats, councilor John Muhlfeld won easily with 1,141 votes — the largest number among all the candidates. He was followed by Ryan Friel with 1,003 votes.

The recount after the Pilot went to print came up with an additional 232 ballots. Election officials reported that more than 30 ballots were damaged by a machine that opens ballot envelopes but, more importantly, ballots were jamming in the machine initially used to scan the ballots.

Eisenzimer said election officials fed the ballots too quickly into the Election Systems and Software model M100 scanner, causing the machine to jam.

Officials then ran the ballots two more times through their ESS model 650 scanner, a machine Eisenzimer has more trust in. She said the results came out the same each time, and she was confident in the results.

New results for other city council candidates included Kent Taylor with 541, John Murdock with 536 votes and Mark McGlenn with 247. All three gained votes in the recount.

County election officials reported 4,357 registered voters in Whitefish, but only 3,910 were active. About 800 of the 3,825 ballots that were mailed out were returned as undeliverable, Eisenzimer said. About 200 ballots were brought to the courthouse in Kalispell from the ballot box at City Hall in Whitefish.

Eisenzimer said 1,854 ballots were counted, giving a 47 percent turnout of active voters. In Kalispell, the election drew a paltry 9 percent turnout.

Pundits had expected a much larger turnout in Whitefish than the 22 percent in the 2005 municipal election because of the mail-in ballots, the large field of candidates and the number of contentious issues facing the city, but ballots trickled in over the three-week voting period.

In this year's all-mail election, Whitefish voters could choose a mayor and three city council candidates, but one-third of the 1,854 approved ballots indicated less than four candidates and are classified as "under votes."

With winning candidates John Muhlfeld and Ryan Friel claiming 43 percent of the total city council vote, some election-watchers think they know where all that under-voting came from.

But was there an organized effort to dissuade voters from choosing three city council candidates, or did voters just pick two council candidates and leave it at that?

Some election-watchers had predicted that Common Sense in White-fish Government's endorsement of four council candidates would lead to over-voting, but only 2 percent of the mail-in ballots were thrown out for marking more than four candidates.

In a race where the top three of seven candidates win, voting for one candidate and not voting for any others strengthens the chosen candidate's chances of winning.

On the other hand, voters who choose that strategy are giving up their right to vote for a full slate of councilors.

The Pilot contacted several people who actively participated in the election —putting up lawn signs, going door-to-door with literature or calling on the phone — but despite the rumors, the Pilot found no evidence of an organized effort to dissuade voters to choose three council candidates.

With Muhlfeld and Friel often promoted together, it's possible voters simply chose them as a slate and had no interest in choosing a third councilor.

Muhlfeld and Friel, along with mayoral candidate Cris Coughlin, also had the support of Montana Conservation Voters (MCV). Headquartered in Billings, the organization has grown significantly since it formed in 1999.

Executive director Theresa Keaveny said about half of MCV's 200 Flathead members were involved in a "grass-roots" effort to support their candidates. Sixty-three MCV members live in Whitefish, about 2 percent of its total membership. MCV also has some out-of-state members

In mid-October, MCV mailed out about 1,500 six-by-11-inch cards with pictures of the Coughlin, Muhlfeld and Friel. Keaveny said the mailers cost $1,675 to produce and distribute. MCV also contacted by phone 535 households with people who hadn't voted by Nov. 1.

"Our mayoral candidate didn't win, but we hope to work with the new mayor," Keaveny said.

Common Sense in White-fish Government (CSWG), the political action committee that splintered off from another local PAC, Quality Whitefish, ran a phone bank out of the Great Northern Brewery.

Dennis Konopatzke, Quality Whitefish's executive director, owns the brewery and is an attorney. He said he helped Whitefish resident Rick Blake start up a CSWG as a registered PAC so it could endorse candidates, and he let Blake use the brewery.

Blake did not return calls from the Pilot.

Konopatzke said Quality Whitefish encouraged residents to vote and promoted positive dialogue, but it didn't support or oppose candidates. The group will remain active in city affairs, he said.

"Now is where the work begins," he said.

One group suspected of being politically active is the Commission For Fair Land Use And Government (CFLUG). The Pilot received two op-ed pieces from CFLUG — one in February, which protested the 30 percent slope regulation, and another in July, which warned about monetary impacts to the city after a jury ruled in favor of the Waltons in their lawsuit against the city.

Members of the group preferred to remain anonymous, and local Realtor Connie Davis acted as spokesperson. Local attorney Sean Frampton was also a public face for CFLUG, and he attended numerous city council and planning board meetings, speaking out about the slope regulation.

On July 13, three days before the city council's scheduled resolution resisting the jury's decision in the Walton case, Frampton e-mailed 26 people encouraging them to organize and oppose the council at that meeting.

Many of those people later said they were not members of CFLUG but were sympathetic to its cause, and it appears that CFLUG, as an organized group, had faded away by the end of summer.

Sensible Land Use, on the other hand, has remained active ever since it mailed out a brochure opposed to the critical areas ordinance in September. Local developer Tim Grattan and Florida businessman Pat Fox stepped forward to say they paid for the brochure after SLU was publicly criticized for operating anonymously.

SLU ran numerous large ads in several Flathead newspapers right through the three-week election period opposing the critical areas ordinance. They mailed out a second brochure after the city responded to SLU's first one with a mailer that criticized Grattan personally.

But like CFLUG, SLU never openly supported or opposed any Whitefish candidates and never registered with the state as a political group.