Tight Race for School Board Finally Over : Election: A month of guesswork ends as Jo Ann Koplin is sworn in after beating Michael Karlin by four votes.

After four torturous weeks of seesawing vote tallies, Jo Ann Koplin and Michael Karlin, rivals in the Nov. 2 race for a seat on the Beverly Hills school board, can put away their antacids and get some sleep.

Koplin, the winner by four votes in a recount completed Friday, was sworn in at Tuesday’s school board meeting. Koplin filed for the recount on Nov. 23, a day after Karlin had been declared the official victor by a one-vote margin.

The final tally was 3,150 votes for Koplin, 3,146 for Karlin and plenty of anguish for both candidates.

“It has been a long month,” said Koplin, who campaigned for the two-year school board seat with the support of the Beverly Hills Education Assn., a teachers union.

Said Karlin: “The champagne stayed on ice . . . It was excruciating and unfairly so for the candidates and their families. I think that Mrs. Koplin and her family suffered as much as mine did.”

Koplin campaigned promising to include teachers, most of whom don’t live in pricey Beverly Hills, in district decision-making. Karlin’s campaign promises included reinvigorating arts programs and expanding computer courses.

It took an entire month following the Nov. 2 election for voters to learn who had won. The ballot count was protracted because of late-arriving absentee and provisional ballots, said Marcia Ventura, spokeswoman for the Los Angeles County registrar-recorder’s office. (Provisional ballots are issued when a person’s qualifications to vote cannot be immediately verified at the polling place.)

That added up to a roller-coaster ride for the candidates. Eight vote-count updates were released before official results were posted Nov. 22. The majority showed a one-vote margin, with the lead changing hands between the two. Two tallies put the candidates in a dead heat. Another showed Koplin with a 17-vote lead.

“I always knew a one-vote margin wasn’t much of a cushion,” said Karlin. “A lot of people congratulated me but I always said it was only one step toward seeing who the final winner would be.”

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The recount took two days and cost Koplin $1,786. Both parties also paid attorneys to oversee the recount along with several other witnesses.

According to Ventura, 528 of the absentee ballots requested by voters were never returned. And 154 ballots were disallowed for reasons ranging from invalid signatures by absentee voters to provisional votes cast in the wrong precinct.

“There’s a lot of apathy about voting, so maybe we can remind people that their vote counts,” Koplin said. “Then what we went through was not in vain.”