But many ballots still outstanding; final count not due until Dec. 3
After a night of some uncertainty, and after a race that was often characterized by its social media viciousness, both current mayor Dominic Foppoli and current councilmember Debora Fudge appear to have retained their positions.
As of 4 p.m. on Wednesday, Foppoli holds a healthy lead in the mayoral race, with 4,837 (44.92%) votes. His closest challenger is Rosa Reynoza with 3,342 (31.04%) votes. Sam Salmon is third with 1,567 (14.55%) and newcomer Tanya Potter is fourth with 1,022 (9.49%).
In the first district town council race, longtime council member Debora Fudge appears to have won re-election with 1,397 (55.20%) of the votes over challenger Jeffrey Leasure with 1,134 votes (44.80%).
However, there is uncertainty in the number of outstanding absentee, mail-in and early votes left to be counted. The county registrar of voters states on its website that “If we receive your ballot by Oct. 29, it will be included in the Election Night results. If you turn your ballot in after that date, we may be able to process it before Election Day, but cannot guarantee that … Vote by Mail ballots take time to process, and any (votes by mail) received by our office on Election Day will not be processed or counted until after the election.”
“Thank you so much to all of my tremendously hard-working supporters. Thank you especially to the people of Windsor for entrusting me to be your first elected Mayor. Thank you to my competitors for running a strong race on the issues. This was one of the most challenging races in our town’s history,” Foppoli announced on his Facebook page on the evening of Nov. 3. “With that said, I have a clear message to everyone in Windsor. Regardless of who you supported … I will be your mayor. Feel free to reach out to me anytime. Together we will continue to keep Windsor the greatest town in America.”
He also took a moment to congratulate Fudge. “Congrats also to my dear friend Debora Fudge for winning tonight,” he said, and Fudge returned the sentiment in her own statement. “Thank you, Windsor — both District 3 for me and all of Windsor for Dominic. I so appreciate your support for us, and for having your trust for another term. We love Windsor and have our collective best interests at heart, always,” she said. “I’m very proud of the two clean campaigns that we both ran, separately and together.”
Fudge also referenced some of the nastiness of this election season, and paid complements to her opponent. “I … want to thank our very hard working supporters and volunteers who put much more than they had to on the line, to keep us moving forward against an onslaught. We owe them more than simple thank you,” Fudge said. “I do need to say that I was very disappointed by the slanderous comments made against the two of us. That needs to stop. That was not the Windsor we love. I would like to thank my opponent Jeff Leasure for running a clean campaign. I’ve always had great respect for Jeff even when we don’t agree. Thank you all again. Now we get back to work.”
Given the uncertainty of the final counts, Reynoza, who was seeking a seat on the council for the third time, isn’t ready to concede.
“I’m not giving up hope just yet,” she said. “Thank you to all the amazing people that supported my efforts . I am so proud of my campaign and with only a $10,000 budget we had amazing results.”
Deva Marie Proto, the registrar of voters, has 28 days to certify the election, and it was unlikely the office would have a clear idea of election results this week.
“We have a lot of vote by mail, they all have to be signature-checked before we can do anything with them, and then all the provisionals have to be processed, researched and keyed in manually,” Proto said on Wednesday afternoon. “And at this point, we’re still counting how many we have.”
The election must be certified by Dec. 3.
Since only ballots received before Oct. 29 have been counted thus far, “We’ve started processing some of the ballots that were dropped off close to the election or received close to the election,” Proto said. “There isn’t really a date cut off at this point, but we have not started processing any of the ballots that were dropped off on election day at the ballot drop boxes or the polling places.”
The registrar’s office has counted and posted 200,000 ballots at this point.
To learn more about how votes are being counted and when numbers will get firmed up, check out our interview with the registrar Deva Marie Proto.
Additional reporting by Camille Escovedo.
