By QUINTON SMITH/YachatsNews
Lincoln County voters – and Claire Hall or Rick Beasley – will not find out for another two weeks who will hold Position 2 on the board of commissioners in January.
The fourth round of vote counts released Tuesday night shows Hall, who has been a county commissioner for 20 years, with a 99-vote lead over Beasley, a Depoe Bay city councilor, 13,073 to12,974.
That’s a margin of one third of one percent — .38 percent — out of 26,047 votes cast in that race.
The final, unofficial results won’t be released by county clerk Amy Southwell until 5 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 26. Until then, Southwell said she and election workers will be trying to resolve issues with 562 ballots not yet counted.
Hall and Beasley both said they’ll wait to declare victory – or say that it was one of the biggest upsets in county election history.
“Not yet,” Hall said Wednesday when asked about being re-elected to a sixth term. “I don’t feel right about declaring a win. But I’m feeling very good that I’ve led all four votes.”
On election night Nov. 5, Hall had a 232-vote lead over Beasley. That tightened to just 49 votes Nov. 6 then increased slightly Friday, Nov. 8 to 67 votes. The latest results Tuesday night gave her a 99-vote lead.
“The odds are good, but the difference changing is not beyond the realm of possibility,” she told YachatsNews.
Beasley said he too will wait for the final, unofficial results to come Thanksgiving week.
“I’m going to wait until the final votes are in,” he said Wednesday. “This is down to the wire … and the more votes that are counted the better it is for us.”
Southwell and her election crew still have a lot of work to do to see if they can get every ballot to count. Here’s the breakdown of the 562 ballots with issues:
- 90 people voted with the wrong ballot;
- 125 ballots were received in time but did not have a signature;
- 330 ballots had something wrong with the signature such as a different last name or with a different signature on file; and
- 17 provisional ballots where people were not registered voters by the state’s deadline but claimed they were.
“The only ones I can say for sure that will count is the ‘voted wrong ballot’, because I will fix those,” Southwell said in an email to YachatsNews. “The rest are on the voter to come resolve the issue.”
“We’re doing everything possible to make every vote count,” she said.
To trigger an automatic recount the margin of votes needs to be within 0.2 percent – or 52 votes, she said.
A record number of 41,288 ballots were sent to Lincoln County voters this election. As of Tuesday night, 29,872 had been counted for a turnout of just under 74 percent, Southwell said. That’s well below the usual Lincoln County turnout of 80 percent or more in presidential election years.
Beasley campaigned against Hall’s record, had the endorsement of Sheriff Curtis Landers and said the county needed a change after her 20 years in office. Hall called her record one of accomplishment on housing, social services, and response to the pandemic and 2020 wildfires.
The two squared off in the general election because Hall did not get more than a 50 percent majority in the May primary when the votes were split between her and four challengers.
Beasley said Wednesday that he swam against the tide in one of the few Oregon counties that increased the number of votes for a Democrat in the presidential race than even in previous years.
“I think this was one of the most interesting races in the state because of the people involved,” he said. “I bucked the trend of Democrat votes in this county.”
Lincoln County is the rare rural coastal county where voters have favored Democrats running for president for the last six general elections dating back to the Al Gore versus George W. Bush contest in 2000.
This time, Lincoln County voters favored Kamala Harris over Donald Trump 17,019 to 11,589.
Even Sen. Dick Anderson, a Republican from Lincoln City who served as mayor there for years, got fewer votes in Lincoln County than his Democrat challenger, Jo Beaudreau of Florence – 13,411 to 14,960. But Anderson won re-election to his second, four-year term 41,715 to 35,746 by getting more votes than Beaudreau in the rest of Senate District 5 that runs through parts of Benton, Lane, Douglas and Coos counties.
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To see the all the Lincoln County numbers for every candidate and race, go to the county clerk’s web page
Thank you, YachatsNews, for keeping us up-to-date. I also thank the candidates for respecting the process, and acknowledging that we have safe, reliable, trustworthy elections, Further thanks to Amy Southwell and everyone in the county clerk’s office for the work they do.