Recount costs settled
Posted Mar 24, 2011 02:10:27 PM.
This article is more than 5 years old.
The City of Kitchener has reached a settlement on legal costs with an unsuccessful election candidate.
The City will pay just over $6100 towards the legal bill of Debbie Chapman, who lost October’s race in Ward 9 by one vote to Frank Etherington.
Kitchener clerk Randy Gosse calls the settlement “reasonable,” admitting that the final amount could have been higher depending on a judge’s ruling. But the City and Chapman reached a negotiated settlement before entering court in Kitchener yesterday.
Ward 9 councillor Frank Etherington is also satisfied with the results but frustrated by the process.
“It feels like a $6100 disappointment,” Etherington laments. “It is the final chapter of that process but I think that process should have never gone beyond the first recount.”
Council granted an electronic recount of the Ward 9 results, which was conducted at City Hall in early November. That was a few weeks after the October 25th election night results had declared Etherington the winner by one vote.
But Chapman exercised her option to request a manual, judicial recount. That second recount was awarded in late December and led to a manual examination of 40 “over-voted” ballots. Those are ballots in which a voter chose too many candidates.
“All of the recounts should have never involved spoiled ballots or over votes because, in those cases, no one can possibly get inside the head of any voter to interpret that voter’s intent,” Etherington insists. “That was the main frustration for me through all of those recounts.”
Chapman’s total legal bill has not been revealed but Etherington says he covered his own legal costs through the ordeal. He declined to divulge that amount.
Gosse says while the work on the recount process took city staff away from other duties they could have been performing, all of the work was done during the day and no overtime was incurred. That means additional costs to the city have not been factored into the overall recount bill.
Gosse calls the work simply part of the election process and points out that $6100 is a small fraction of the $300,000 cost of running a municipal election.
