Donna Christensen took a slim lead in St. Thomas voting over Kenneth Mapp Wednesday night in the race for V.I. governor, as the St. Thomas-St. John District Board of Elections worked its way through about 1,500 early voting ballots from Tuesday’s general election.
Coupled with the vote on St. Croix, which is also incomplete, the change of fortune in the governor’s race appears to make a runoff more likely. When counting had stopped early Wednesday morning after the election, Mapp and his running mate, Osbert Potter, held 49.35 percent of the territorywide vote, to 35.73 percent for Christensen and running mate Basil Ottley.
If neither candidate garners at least 50 percent of the vote plus one, the top two vote getters will run off 14 days after the election, which this year is Nov. 18.
As of 9:30 p.m., the results of the newly counted ballots on St. Thomas left the district’s Senate race pretty much unchanged.
According to District Board chairman Arturo Watlington Jr., Wednesday’s count put Christensen ahead on St. Thomas-St. John by a small margin. Along with the first set of early voting ballots, the board also went through the 400-plus votes from Joseph Sibilly Elementary that were not counted Tuesday night.
In the district Senate race, Watlington said the winners so far remained as they had at the end of counting Tuesday night, with newcomer Justin Harrigan still in eighth place, trailing Sen. Donald “Ducks” Cole by 42 votes.
The ballots Wednesday were fed into the system’s new machines to be tabulated, and Watlington said that only 53 were rejected. The next step, he explained, would be to evaluate the rejected ballots and see if they could be duplicated by the board or not.
“Those that are spoiled in certain categories could be remade, or they might be too spoiled to duplicate,” Watlington said. “Once we go through them, we would have to decide, but in order to scan them, they would have to be redone.”
Watlington said the board still has to count the 115 “symbol ballots,” in which residents voted according to their party affiliation. He explained that those ballot would also have to be evaluated, since voters could have filled in the bubble next to a particular party, but still could have voted for non-party candidates.
The District Board will resume counting at 10 a.m. Thursday.
