Bruce Gould filed a petition for a recount on Monday after being only one point away from tying for the second Nashville Town Council spot.
“I’m fully aware I could lose votes or it could go either way,” said Gould. “I have no delusions on what could happen here.”
After the Nov. 7 election, Lance Miller and Rex Watters III were declared the top two vote getters with 116 votes each, narrowly defeating Bruce Gould at 111 votes.
However, there were 11 provisional ballots that had to be dealt with. After the election board meeting to do so, Nine of the 11 ballots were certified and those votes were added to the total with Watters ending up with 120 votes, Miller with 118 and Gould only one behind with 117.
Gould said when the election board opened those 9 ballots and read them off and tabulated them through the voting machine, it jammed up on number seven and there was an issue with processing those nine ballots.
“That just bothers me a little bit that the machine wasn’t reading the one ballot correctly and it quit and they had to keep refeeding it through the machine,” said Gould. “I would just feel a lot more confident with a recount, and I did request on this recount that they’d be hand counted.”
State law allows any candidate 14 days after the election to ask for a recount and they are allowed to ask for the recount to be counted by hand. It is unclear if the time between the election and the meeting to validate the provisional ballots impacts that timeframe.