A recount Friday of the results of Ellsworth’s City Council election last week has confirmed the winners that were announced Nov. 4.
Carol Patterson-Martineau and Marinna Smith kept their edges in a razor-thin contest that on Friday saw local businessman John Linnehan come up short by 2 votes. After Friday’s recount, the vote tallies stood at 1,227 for Linnehan, 1,229 for Patterson-Martineau, and 1,230 for Smith.
The recount did not change Linnehan’s vote total, and only slightly changed the totals for Patterons-Martineau and Smith, who each still had more votes than Linnehan after the review concluded on Friday.
Unofficial results released by city officials on Nov. 4 showed Linnehan had gotten 1,227 votes while Marinna Smith had 1,229 and Carol Patterson-Martineau had 1,231. Patterson-Martineau and Smith were declared winners that night, as was first-place finisher Patrick Shea, who got 1,283 votes.
There were seven candidates in the race, but Friday’s recount applied only to the individual vote totals for Linnehan, Patterson-Martineau and Smith. Linnehan was the only candidate to request a recount, and Linnehan, Patterson-Martineau and Smith were the only candidates with totals close enough to each other — within 1.5% of the total number of votes cast in the race — that they qualified for a city-funded recount, according to Ellsworth City Clerk Suzanne McLean.
Had another candidate wanted to have their totals reviewed on Friday, they would have had to pay at least part of the cost of the recount because their total was not close enough to another candidates’ total to qualify for a city-funded recount, McLean said.
All seven candidates in the race were newcomers running for seats being vacated by incumbents who chose not to run again. In addition to Linnehan, other candidates who came up short on Election Night were Eric Marichal with 1,207 votes, Earl Awalt with 1,101 votes, and Timothy Carter with 766.
Linnehan, who requested the recount within minutes of the unofficial results being announced on Nov. 4, also ran for City Council in 2016 and has run every year for the past 5 years, but has never been elected. Linnehan lost in 2022 to Jon Stein — who decided this year not to seek re-election — by 56 votes but, after a recount in that race, gained only one extra vote.
Friday’s recount began at City Hall at 9 a.m. City officials initially said that the recount could possibly be paused Friday night and then resumed the next morning, but later said that they would stay into the evening to finish the review so no one would have to come back to City Hall on Saturday.
