Challenger holds slim lead in L.A. college board race
The cliffhanger wore on Wednesday in the runoff election for a seat on the Los Angeles Community College District board, with challenger Roy Burns 88 votes ahead of incumbent Georgia L. Mercer in unofficial results -- and a hand count underway of 10,600 ballots.
The Los Angeles city clerk, whose office conducted the election that saw about 130,000 votes cast, has three weeks to certify the election results.
“I’ll tell you exactly how I feel: excited,” said Burns, 60, a retired Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy who teaches criminal justice part time at College of the Canyons in Santa Clarita. Mercer beat him by about 15,000 votes in the March primary, “so when I put my head on my pillow, I said, ‘Please, God, let it be close. Let it be respectable. So I have a shot. A shot.’ ”
The unofficial results of Tuesday’s election had Burns with 50.04% of the vote, and Mercer, an incumbent in office since 1998 and the current board president, with 49.96%.
Many of the 10,600 ballots to be counted are believed to fall into three categories: provisional ballots cast by voters who thought they were registered but whose names did not appear on poll lists, ballots that ended up in the Los Angeles County registrar-recorder’s office instead of the city clerk’s, and ballots that could not be read clearly by the machine counter.
Some absentee ballots also apparently remain to be tallied, officials said.
Mercer, 65, said that given Burns’ narrow lead and the substantial number of ballots still being counted, “I’m pretty optimistic that I have a chance to come back.”
“One thing I thought for sure, that it would be over [Tuesday night], no matter what -- but it’s not,” Mercer said.
The runoff for Seat 5 on the seven-member board was required after none of the four candidates in the March primary received more than 50% of the votes.
The Board of Trustees oversees a nearly $1-billion budget for the country’s largest community college district.
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Times staff writer Stuart Silverstein contributed to this report.
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