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2021 city and school election results official with county canvass

By Bob Steenson, bsteenson@charlescitypress.com

There were a few tiny changes in the final vote count for the city and school board elections after the official “first tier” canvass last week and the “second tier” canvass this week, but no changes in the results.

The Floyd County Board of Supervisors held its official second tier canvass Monday morning, officially adopting the results of school elections where the school district extends into one or more additional counties.

Under new Iowa laws that took effect in 2019, there are two tiers to the election canvassing process. Each city and each school district that extends into more than one county has a control county — the county it is predominantly located in.

Floyd County is the control county for the Charles City School District and the Rudd-Rockford-Marble Rock School District, but part of the Charles City School District is in Chickasaw County and a part of the RRMR district is in Cerro Gordo County and a tiny tip of the district is in Mitchell County.

Likewise, parts of the Osage, Central Springs, North Butler and Nashua-Plainfield school districts are in Floyd County, but Mitchell County, Worth County, Butler County and Chickasaw County are the control counties for those districts.

Chickasaw County is also the control county for the city of Nashua, which extends into Floyd County.

During the first canvass after the election, all the votes in the county are tallied and affirmed by that county’s board of supervisors, including the votes for cities and school districts controlled by other counties.

In the second tier canvass, the controlling county takes all the votes from other non-control counties and adds them to the total.

So Monday the Floyd County Board of Supervisors canvassed the results for the Charles City School District that came from Chickasaw County and the results for the RRMR School District that came from Cerro Gordo and Mitchell counties.

The race for Charles City Board of Education was close enough that the votes from Chickasaw County could have impacted the results. But as the Press reported election night, the Chickasaw votes did make the race closer, but did not change the results.

With three spots open for the Charles City school board, the race for the third seat came down to between incumbent Josh Mack and challenger Claire Jung. With just the Floyd County vote, the result was Mack 853 votes and Jung 830. The Chickasaw County voters in the Charles City School District added 13 votes for Jung and none for Mack, bringing the race to an even closer 853 to 843, a difference of 10 votes.

Last week the board certified the official tally for all the races exclusively in Floyd County.

As County Auditor and Commissioner of Elections Gloria Carr reported, the canvass showed that the vote totals matched those initially reported by the ballot scanning machines, however there were three provisional ballots filed and two of those were accepted for counting, adding a couple of additional votes to a couple of races.

One of the results that was left to be decided with the canvass last week was the City Council for Colwell. With five seats available and no candidates running, all five positions were filled by write-in votes.

The Colwell City Council before the election had consisted of members Jennifer Cross, Mark Kirsch, Ryan Wegner, Rachel Krause and Judy Budwig.

After the write-in votes were counted and certified, four of the seats on the Colwell City Council will remain the same, but Kim Isakson will replace Budwig.

The write-in results were Wegner, 6 votes; Kirsch, Krause and Cross, 5 votes each; and Isakson, 4 votes. Six other write-in votes were also cast for other people, but none received enough votes to bump Isakson out of the fifth seat.

In Marble Rock, enough write-in votes were cast for one candidate to defeat a person on the ballot for City Council. Incumbents Tracy Merfeld and Todd Schreiver received 53 and 46 votes respectively for the first two available seats.

John Marzen received 28 votes, and on election night it looked like he had won the third available seat on the Marble Rock City Council, but during the canvass it was reported that 29 write-in votes had been cast for Earl Keifer, giving Keifer the third seat.

Carr reported that 2,427 people voted in Floyd County for the election Nov. 2. There were 2,092 votes cast at the polls on election day, and 332 voters had voted absentee in advance, either by early in-person voting or by returning an absentee ballot. And as noted, two of three provisional ballots were accepted for counting.

In addition,

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