Some La Paz County races were too close to call Wednesday morning, with an unusually high number of provisional ballots still to be counted and a tight write-in race for County Attorney still being counted today.
La Paz County has confirmed that there are 810 ballots still to be counted countywide, which could shake up some of the races in the General Election. (A further breakdown of these uncounted votes is below.) Write-in votes are still being verified and further results may be available by around 4:30 p.m. today.
This leaves some races up in the air. Still, we can call wins in four of the races.
(1) District 2 Supervisor

King Clapperton will take District 2 Supervisor. With a comfortable 61% of the vote, 790 votes separate him and his nearest opponent, and there are only 330 votes left to be counted in District 2.

(2) District 3 Supervisor

Incumbent Holly Irwin will take the District 3 Supervisor race. 287 votes separate her from her opponent, and only 211 votes remain to be counted in District 3.

(3) County Assessor

Sharon Schuler, the incumbent for County Assessor, will take the race. Although there are 810 votes still out, there are exactly that many votes between Schuler and Kossnar. This means Kossnar would need to take all of the uncounted votes even to tie.

(4) County Sheriff

John Drum will take the race for Sheriff. He has a healthy margin of 1377 votes between him and his nearest opponent, and only 810 votes remain to be counted in the race.

District 1 Supervisor: Let’s take a look at the math.

It’s clear that D.L. Wilson is in the lead. 186 votes separate him from Gilbert, and 204 votes separate him from Page. There are 269 votes still out for District 1. This means that for Gilbert or Page to win, they would need to take an unproportionately high percentage of the uncounted votes. Considering that the percentage of the vote they each took so far was 28% and 26% respectively, these may be fairly high hurdles.

AWC Governing Board District 2:

Melissa Wright leads with 1105 votes to 775. With 419 votes still remaining to be counted in the AWC District 2 race, this means Jim Brouillette would need to take almost 80% of the uncounted votes, while his current trend in votes counted so far is 41%. Again, this would be a very high hurdle.

County Attorney: The results so far are as follows.
  • Dan Field – 371
  • Tony Rogers – 341
  • Steve Lundell – 270
  • Glenn Buckelew – 267
  • Martin Brannan – 10
There are 810 uncounted votes. So far, approximately one quarter (25%) of the ballots have contained valid, counted write-in votes for County Attorney. If this percentage holds true for the remaining votes, we could speculate that there are around 202 votes up for grabs in this race. This means a race that’s still too close to call, especially for Dan Field and Tony Rogers, who are separated by only 30 votes.

Provisional and late early ballots are being counted and may not be available in revised totals until next week. Write-in votes still being counted may be updated later today.