Board of Supervisors: Recount confirms Shirk’s victory

A recount Friday of three precincts in the Carson City Board of Supervisors race between Jim Shirk and Molly Walt confirmed Shirk’s narrow 25-vote victory.The board will canvass the results in the Ward 4 race at its Thursday meeting, making the result official.Walt, the incumbent in Ward 4, asked for the recount after losing Nov. 6, but when the three precincts she chose for the review were checked, each candidate had just one more vote than the original tally. Clerk-Recorder Alan Glover said that was the result of a couple of ballots getting counted as part of the wrong precinct on election night. He said the final vote totals wouldn’t change at all. Shirk won with 10,335 votes to Walt’s 10,310.In order to generate a city-wide recount, Glover said there would have to be a change of at least five votes in the three sampled precincts.Gianna Shirk, Shirk’s daughter who observed the process, praised Glover and his staff for their professionalism in handling the process.“I think this really shows how important every vote is,” she said, referring to the close tally.To do the recount, Glover’s staff ran the voting machine cartridges through a computer to re-tally them. He said before the count started that any difference likely would show in the absentee and duplicated ballots since those had to be scanned one at a time. The committee he appointed to do the job compared each of those ballots with the original absentee ballots to ensure they were properly recorded. No voters’ names appear on the actual ballots so their privacy is protected.When the process was completed, the committee agreed unanimously there was not enough change in the totals to warrant a full recount.Linda Curtis, one of the people Glover appointed to do the recount, described it as “an interesting process.”“I’ve never been through this before,” she said.Shirk will be one of two new Board of Supervisors members when he is sworn in. The other is Brad Bonkowski who replaces the retiring Shelly Aldean in the Ward 2 seat. The two will take join the board in January.