Recount tallies same result

Henderson City Council candidate Thomas Wagner needed at least 85 votes to swing his way to change the outcome of his primary election loss to incumbent Andy Hafen.

Instead, Wagner got none.

The recount conducted Monday by Clark County election officials produced exactly the same result as the one reported on election night: Hafen 6,411, Wagner 6,242.

"It's a nice relief," said Wagner, who showed up about an hour into the recount and stayed through the end. "It's a chapter you can close, and a new chapter can begin."

Wagner said he plans to stay involved in Henderson and eventually run for office again.

Hafen did not attend the recount, which was conducted at the Clark County Election Center in North Las Vegas. His campaign manager, Matt Higginson, was there in his place.

"I think it's what we anticipated," Higginson said as the recount wrapped up. "We were pretty confident that nothing was going to change, and it looks like nothing will."

Reached later at his home, Hafen said he was pleased with the result.

"We ran a good, positive race, and I'm glad we came out with the majority of votes," he said.

The process started with a computer recount of eight election precincts handpicked by the Wagner campaign.

The 1,777 ballots cast in those precincts were then counted manually by a team of four county election workers -- one of them a registered Republican, one a Democrat and the remaining two non-partisans.

Higginson and Wagner's campaign manager, Steve Forsythe, sat with an empty chair between them and kept their own running count on tally sheets provided by Clark County Registrar of Voters Larry Lomax.

County election worker Donna Cardinelli's job on Monday was to read each ballot aloud so it could be tallied by two of her co-workers. Basically, she spent 2 1/2 hours repeating the words "Hafen" and "Wagner" close to 1,800 times. "Those are two names I'll never forget," she said.

After the hand count, Henderson's remaining 142 precincts were fed through the computer on last time, just to confirm the overall vote totals and results. Everything came out just as it had on election night.

"It's what I expected," Lomax said. "It shows that we did it right the first time."

Henderson City Clerk Monica Simmons was similarly pleased.

"It validates the process," she said. "I think Tom Wagner and his people needed a comfort level (with the results). It's never a bad thing to generate confidence in the process."

Wagner needed the recount tally to differ from the election day results by more than 1 percent to trigger a hand recount of all 12,750 votes cast in the race.

Hafen, who has represented Henderson's Second Ward since 1987, was officially declared the winner of a sixth term when the City Council certified the primary election results on April 10.

Though the recount didn't change anything, Simmons said the results of the Ward 2 race will be brought back before the council to be certified again sometime in May.

Hafen is scheduled to be sworn in term at 6 p.m. today, along with Ward 4 incumbent Steve Kirk and newly elected Ward 1 councilwoman Geri Schroder.

Wagner plans to be there.

"I will be there to congratulate all three of them, as I did before," he said.

The only thing left to be determined is how much the recount cost.

Wagner was required to make a $1,600 deposit when he requested the recount last week. Simmons said it is unlikely the process cost more than that.

Any money left over will be refunded to Wagner.

Lomax said this was the first recount conducted in Clark County since 2000, when attorney Uri Clinton unsuccessfully challenged his election loss to state Sen. Joe Neal.