BY BRADEN CARTWRIGHT
Daily Post Staff Writer
An initial vote count, announced tonight, shows that Keith Reckdahl was elected to Palo Alto City Council by 10 votes over Doria Summa amid a controversy over how her name appeared on electronic ballots. This includes totals from the county’s automatic recount.
Nine candidates ran for four seats on council, and the electronic voting machines used at polling places only showed eight of the candidates on the first page.
Voters had to press “MORE” to find Summa’s name on the second page.
Summa and Reckdahl received the same number of votes by mail — 10,583. But Reckdahl had 980 votes on the electronic voting machines on Election Day compared to 968 for Summa.
“This is a very unfortunate situation and it disadvantages one candidate compared to the others,” Mayor Greer Stone said in an email blast on Election Day.
Summa said she heard from voters who thought she dropped out of the race, but she had no way to know how the formatting issue impacted her vote count.
“The limitation on the number of candidates visible at a single time on the touchscreen is necessary due to the limited size of the screen and the need to preserve a minimum font size for readability,” Registrar of Voters spokesman Steve Goltiao said in an email to the Post when asked about the issue.
Reckdahl and Summa are aligned with Stone, Vice Mayor Ed Lauing and Councilman Pat Burt.
Councilwoman Lydia Kou and Councilman Greg Tanaka are leaving council after eight years.
Reckdahl, 57, was appointed to the Parks and Recreation Commission in February 2013 and the Planning and Transportation Commission in December 2021.
Reckdahl will join Commissioner George Lu as the new faces on the seven-member council starting on Jan. 6.
Wait wait – the recount isn’t finished. Must be done by Dec 5.
Doria needs to pick up 7 votes to win.
Maybe should chill till recount over.
This is pathetic. The Registrar’s office has been lying about not receiving anuy complaints. I know because a several of us sent emails and called the numbers listed on their website and no one responded, including the 2 men named in a previous article.
We deserve better. JHL should resign because we need decent ethical representation. She already cost us Simitian in Congress while doing Stanford’s bidding to oust Simitian because he dated to question Stanford’s lies that its massive expansion hasn’t added a single new car trip.
This recount reminds me of 2000 when the Democratic Party vote counters in Miami would wave ballots around, hoping the little pieces of paper, “chads”, would fall out so that the ballot would show would seem to show the voter selected both candidates. A ballot marked for both candidates would have to be thrown out, since there was no way to determine the voter’s intent after the election.
Wonder how many hundreds of thousands of dollars Doria Summa’s attorney will drive away from Santa Clara County’s Chambers with?