Mason - East Lansing school board candidates Randy Bell and William Donohue entered the Ingham County Courthouse as equals Friday. The men stood tied with 1,259 votes in the race for a second open seat on the board of education.
They would leave the historic courthouse with the nearly 2-week-old deadlock broken. Under the terms of a 1955 state law, they drew from two pieces of paper - one that said “elected,” and one that said “not elected” - to determine the winner of the June 10 election.
Donohue, a 52-year-old communication professor, drew “elected.”
But the story of the East Lansing school board election may not end there. Bell, a 46-year-old MSU faculty member, filed a petition Friday asking for a recount in the election. He said the request for a recount does not reflect his opinion of Donohue.
The two men have said they supported each other in the race.
“I supported Bill, I voted for Bill and I will support Bill,” Bell said. “One of the lessons learned from the 2000 presidential election is that machines can and do make mistakes.”
The Ingham County Board of Canvassers will meet this week to examine the petition and set a date to conduct the recount, said county Clerk Mike Bryanton, who oversaw Friday’s drawing. It’s likely the board will recount the 2,495 ballots cast in the election by hand, he said.
East Lansing school elections use a punch card ballot, like those used in the contested Florida presidential election. But Bryanton said the machines used to count the ballots are “fairly accurate.”
This is not the first time an election in Ingham County has been decided by such close margins. Lansing City Clerk Debbie Miner was elected by only one vote last year after a recount reduced her two-vote lead.
Also, a 1989 Lansing School District millage request was defeated because the vote was tied.
“All of this underscores the importance of the individual vote,” Bryanton said.
Bryanton, in his eighth year as Ingham County clerk, used Friday’s drawing to push the need for election reform in Michigan.
He said the state should combine the state’s election dates to encourage more voters to participate.
Only one of nine Ingham County school districts that had elections June 10 reported more than 10 percent of its voters participated. Four had fewer than 5 percent vote.
The East Lansing school district reported 8.6 percent of its 29,118 voters cast a ballot in the election, although no one voted at the designated polling area for Precinct 13, Owen Graduate Hall. East Lansing attorney Daphne O’Regan, 42, received 1,276 votes to win one and 2002 East Lansing High School graduate Brett Gillespie, 18, came in fourth with 774 votes.
The message from Bryanton and the two tied candidates was that better turnout could have avoided the drama of drawing from a hat to determine the winner.
