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Prescott council asks staff to draft charter amendment after questions about multi-seat runoffs
Summary
After questions raised by the August primary about how Prescott calculates majorities in multi-seat council races, the City Council directed staff to draft possible charter language aligning local practice with state statute or clarifying the current ballots-votes wording.
Prescott, Ariz. — The Prescott City Council on Sept. 9 directed staff to begin drafting changes to the city charter after the August primary exposed ambiguities in how the city calculates a majority in multi-seat council contests.
The direction follows presentations from city staff and public comments pointing out that the county’s election management system reports ballots and vote totals differently, and cannot identify how many ballots contained zero, one, two or three votes in a multi-seat contest. "Unfortunately, our election management system does not break out that data," resident Jim Gehring said while summarizing the county response.
Why it matters: The charter language approved by voters in 2010 uses the phrase "majority of all the valid ballots cast," which city staff said has been interpreted in practice as total ballots minus overvotes, divided by two plus one. Council members and candidates said that wording produced uncertainty after the recent primary and led to a runoff in which no candidate had an outright majority under the current calculation.
What the council heard and decided - City staff explained that the county’s EMS (Unison Voting Solutions Inc.) reports total ballots tabulated and vote…
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