Jewell

GRANITE — A week after Election Day, the mayor’s race in the tiny Grant County community of Granite remained too close to call.

Unofficial results as of Monday, Nov. 14, stood as follows:

David Mosteit: 8

Sandra Smith: 11

Dorothy Jewell: 12

A total of 31 ballots have been tabulated so far, and there are 35 registered voters with addresses in Granite, according to Grant County Clerk Brenda Percy.

Ballots postmarked on or before Election Day will be counted, provided they are received by election officials within a week.

In a race this close, the official results will have to wait until the very last ballots are tallied, Percy said. There are challenges on signatures yet to be resolved on county-wide totals. The final counts will be performed on Oct. 29, with certification on the 30th and results announced the morning of Dec. 1.

The vote tallies for Granite’s mayoral election were locked in a tie between Sandra Smith and Dorothy Jewell in unofficial returns on election night, Tuesday, Nov. 8. On Thursday, a potentially tie-breaking vote was added to the tally, putting Jewell in the lead by one vote.

Two city council seats will also be decided, with both determined purely from write-in candidates as nobody filed to have their names appear on the ballot. No returns are currently available for that race.

When reached for comment on election night, Jewell said she planned to go down to city hall in the morning and see if she could get in to find the bylaws. “The current council and mayor are the only ones who have keys to the building,” she explained, noting the building has been closed for “some time.”

Mosteit, the incumbent mayor, is now trailing by four votes, which could be an insurmountable deficit. He was reached by phone the day after Election Day while elk hunting. He was in his truck, warming up with coffee after having “putzed around for a while,” unaware of the results. “It is what it is,” he said. “And so I’ll be glad to step aside and turn it over to those folks.” When he heard the vote was a tie, he suggested a tie-breaker could be to “put the two girls at the bottom of the hill and have a race to the mailbox at the top of Center Street and see who wins.”

He said he might go to city hall to dig through the boxes of papers to find the city charter, hoping it might spell out the next steps should the election remain tied. But if the unofficial result holds up, that won’t be necessary.