In both contested Summit County Council races, the two Democratic candidates have slightly widened their leads.
Incumbent Roger Armstrong leads Republican Tory Welch, an entrepreneur from Hoytsville, by about 2,000 votes for reelection to the seat he’s held for 12 years.
In the race for the only vacant seat, housing advocate Megan McKenna has 1,200 votes more than Republican Ari Ioannides, a board member at Park City Institute and the North Summit Fire District.
There are still about 5,000 of the 27,000 ballots left to count at the Summit County Clerk’s Office, as of early Nov. 11.
So neither lead is insurmountable. But, with Summit County’s history of voting blue, it’s unlikely the races for council will flip.
Summit County Clerk Eve Furse says part of the reason it's taken a week to count this year’s ballots is an “unusually high number of write-in votes.”
Those are for races for Utah governor, U.S. Senate and the presidency.
Phil Lyman and Natalie Clawson, who lost the Republican nomination in the gubernatorial race this summer, account for the majority of write-ins in that race, according to Furse.
She says there aren’t many write-ins for the U.S. Senate, but the clerks are seeing a large amount of write-ins supporting Mitt Romney for president.
The clerk’s office says those aren’t valid because Romney is not running for president. He’s retiring from the Senate this year, and current U.S. Rep. John Curtis was elected to fill the vacancy.
Write-ins take extra time to process because they require two people to review them individually.
There are also new registered voters this year, which means the clerk’s office has only one signature from them on file and may have difficulty verifying it.
When a signature is denied, Furse says there are two more levels of review, and state law requires them to send a letter to the voter within two business days of rejection to ask them to come verify it in person.
The Summit County Clerk’s Office continued counting ballots over the weekend.
There were two local ballot initiatives, one for a new countywide sales tax and another multi-million dollar bond for a new North Summit High School.
The sales tax is certain to pass, because there are nearly 9,000 more “yes” votes than “no.”
Opinion on North Summit’s $114 million bond is split, but most voters have said “no.” There is a margin of only about 300 votes.
