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Bradenton Election Decided By 24 Votes

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By ANTHONY CORMIER, Sarasota Herald-Tribune

Published: November 29, 2007

BRADENTON - Perhaps this is the last time Wayne Poston and Bill Evers will share the same political stage, but the curtain has not yet fallen.

In past elections and again in Tuesday night's runoff, these bitter rivals have been separated by slimmer and slimmer margins.

Seven hundred votes in 1999.

About 250 in 2003.

And just 24 in Tuesday's runoff election.

Poston, Bradenton's mayor, appears to have kept his job with one of the tightest margins in city history, sweating out the results to the last minute.

The results are not yet official, though. Because Poston prevailed by a fraction of a percentage point, a recount is required by law. It begins this morning. When the early returns trickled into the elections office Tuesday evening, Poston trailed by more than 200 votes.

When he heard the numbers, Poston told his wife, Micki, that he loved her and that "we ran a good race." Moments later, though, as the final precincts were counted and Poston emerged as the apparent winner of a third term, he appeared nearly speechless.

"It feels great," he said. "I mean - wow! Twenty-four votes."

The recount starts at 10 a.m. today. The city council will not certify the winner until every one of the ballots is fed back through an optical scanner at the elections office in downtown Bradenton.

Yet even those in Evers' camp do not expect the results to change.

At a small party, Evers' campaign manager, Dan Molter, spoke into his cell phone and peppered the elections supervisor with questions about absentee ballots and the recount.

Searching for any sliver of hope, Molter was rebuffed: The absentee ballots had to be in by 7 p.m. Tuesday and were counted. The optical scanners are rarely in error.

"So there's nothing left?" he asked into his phone.

Inside the party, Evers seemed none too upset by the apparent defeat. After all, he has lost to Poston twice before, trailed him in the Nov. 6 election that precipitated the runoff and figured he was running an uphill race again in Tuesday's runoff.
Poston raised more money, had access to more powerful friends and won recommendations from two local newspapers and the firefighters and police unions.

"The people spoke, and I am going to respect that," Evers said.

Bill Johnson, who has a small metalworks studio in the Village of the Arts, played the spoiler in Round One on Nov. 6 by pulling in voters without a strong allegiance to either better-known candidate, prompting the runoff.

Johnson endorsed Evers, but that was not enough. In fact, many of the same voters who chose the newcomer may have stayed home during the runoff, as turnout hovered around 25 percent.

While there was hardly a mandate - especially when only 7,000 of the city's 29,000 voters showed up - Poston said a win is a win, regardless of the margin.

"Twenty-four feels like a million to me," he said.

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