Pima County Elections Division has updated the results of its counting of the remaining ballots from the Nov. 3 election and it looks like Republican Steve Kozachik has defeated Ward 6 Deomcratic incumbent Nina Trasoff by 1,675 votes.
In the extremely close Ward 3 race, Democratic incumbent Karin Uhlich has held her lead over Republican challenger Ben Buehller-Garcia, though it shrunk to 246 votes.
However, though Buehller-Garcia is within 0.65 percent of Uhlich, it’s not close enough to trigger a recount. Arizona law requires candidates to be within 0.5 percent to automatically trigger a recount.
That said, it appears there are still thousands of bad ballots that may go uncounted. It may be worth Buehller-Garcia’s time and money to find a lawyer and consider forcing the county to prove it rightly mucked those ballots. He’s not close enough for a recount, but too close to just walk away.
And Prop. 400, the Home Rule provision, also appears to have lost, which will cost the city millions of tax dollars.
The county had thousand of uncounted ballots left to count Tuesday, most of those early ballots that arrived in the mail Monday and Tuesday or that were dropped off at polling places Tuesday. There were also a number of provisional ballots, which are issued to voters who have some kind of problem at the polls, either they lack identification, showed up at the wrong polling place, or records showed they received an early ballot.
Not all of the uncounted ballots were from city precincts. Some were cast for school elections in Oro Valley, Sahuarita and Catalina Foothills. The latest results were posted by the county on its web site at 5:20 p.m.