In Nenana, challenger wins by 5 votes; in Eagle, ‘the incumbent, held on to his seat by one vote’ mayor says
Final results from last week’s municipal election have confirmed winning candidates for contested Nenana and Eagle City Council seats.
Nenana’s City Council on Tuesday declared Kari Irish the winner in her race against incumbent Councilmember Sheryl Turner.
Unofficial results after last Tuesday’s election showed Irish leading Turner by nine votes. But after the canvassing board reviewed ballots and the council certified them, that margin shrank to five in the final tally of 58 to 53 votes.
In a text Irish sent Tuesday, she thanked Sheryl Turner for, quote, “her service to the community during her time on the City Council and for a good run for her seat.” Unquote.
On Monday, the Eagle City Council certified that town’s election results that confirmed an incumbent member won re-election by an even slimmer margin than the two-vote lead he held last week.
“That was pretty close, but Darrel Christensen, the incumbent, held on to his seat by one vote,” says Daniel Helmer, the mayor of the 1-square-mile town on the Yukon River near the Canadian border. Helmer said Tuesday that the final tally showed Christensen barely defeated challenger Theresa Dean by a vote of 18 to 17.
“The close race, the one for Seat D -- that came down to the absentee ballots,” he said.
Helmer says the outcome showed the importance of casting absentee ballots when a voter can’t make it to the polls on Election Day.
That’s what happened to him last week when he missed out on voting in the local election for the first time since he moved to Eagle.
“My wife, Kristin, had a medical emergency and we were both stuck in Fairbanks during this time! And I hadn’t applied for an absentee ballot, so neither one of us voted, either,” he said. “We usually vote every single election.”
But it turns out that Helmer didn’t need those two votes, because he was unopposed in his bid for re-election this year.
