Voters pass up Volusia elections

Glitches slow results despite low turnout

Kevin P. Connolly | Orlando Sentinel
Posted October 12, 2005   
 DeLAND Voters in 10 Volusia County cities responded to municipal elections mostly with a collective yawn Tuesday, while elections officials scrambled because of a couple of glitches that delayed results.

For the few who did show up in east Volusia, most picked incumbent Yvonne Scarlett-Golden and Mike Shallow as finalists for mayor of Daytona Beach. In west Volusia, George Coleman and Greg France emerged as the favorites to fill a vacancy in a five-way contest for DeBary's mayor.

At least one recount for a City Council seat in DeBary is possible because only seven votes separate two candidates.

But the possibility of a historic political first a Hispanic majority on the Deltona City Commission vanished with Hispanic candidates in districts 5 and 6 failing to make it to the next round.

Those races and others, including Deltona's heated mayoral race between newcomer Dennis Mulder and City Commissioner Doug Horn, will be decided during election showdowns Nov. 8.

The results reported Tuesday night were unofficial and didn't include two categories of ballots "unscanned" ballots that couldn't be read by optical-scan tabulators and "provisional" ballots cast by voters whose registration status was unknown Tuesday.

Election-oversight committees for most cities will consider whether to count those votes today.

Tuesday's elections, ignored by a vast majority of voters, primarily ed finalists by eliminating the weakest candidates.

In Daytona Beach, incumbent Zone 5 Commissioner Dwayne Taylor beat three challengers for an outright win Tuesday by taking more than 61 percent of the vote far more than the 50 percent-plus-one required for victory.

Traci Anderson in Holly Hill, Dennis Kennedy in Port Orange and Jim McCormick in Ponce Inlet also were likely instant winners.

But glitches kept results in limbo.

One malfunction happened in Daytona Beach, where officials reported an apparent failure of a memory card in a ballot tabulator at a city fire station off Botefuhr Avenue.

The problem delayed the transmission of the tally from the precinct to the main elections office in DeLand. Volusia County Elections Supervisor Ann McFall noted a discrepancy of three to five ballots between the machine count and ballots cast.

She pledged "a full audit" of that precinct today. More technical problems delayed results from Deltona, DeBary and Port Orange. Phone-line problems forced election workers to take memory cards with the electronic results to the main office so they could be included in the results.

In Deltona, candidates who could have created the possibility of a Hispanic majority on the City Commission fell short. Voters dumped incumbent Charles DeZaruba and picked Janet Deyette and David McKnight as finalists for District 5. Another candidate, Rafael Valle, who was born in Cuba, came in third and was eliminated.

In the District 6 race, voters favored non-Hispanics Michael Carmolingo and Nikkie Lewis. The two Hispanic candidates, Luis A. Ramos and Providencia Rodriguez, were cut.

Rodriguez, who came in last in the four-way race, said that all that matters is whether the elected officials are doing a good job.

The candidacies of Valle, Ramos, Rodriguez and another Hispanic Zenaida Denizac, who faces Dick Pearce for District 1 on Nov. 8 raised the possibility of a Hispanic majority on the City Commission of predominantly non-Hispanic white Deltona.

David Santiago, the city's second Hispanic elected to office, already holds one seat on the seven-member commission in Deltona, where 20 percent of residents are Hispanic.

Across Volusia, turnout was relatively light, ranging from 18 percent in Daytona Beach to less than 5 percent in DeLand, where only seven policy issues not candidates were on the ballot. All the issues passed.

One of the charter amendments Question 4 was approved by 61 percent, and it gives city commissioners the power to bump up their pay. Currently, commissioners are paid $4,799.60 annually, while the mayor gets $6,598.80 a year.

Rather than relying on an amendment to the charter, which happens only once about every seven years and must be approved by voters, commissioners will now have the option of voting for pay raises themselves during a commission meeting.

Commissioners can't take the pay raise without first standing for re-election, and the first pay raise can't take effect until after the 2007 election.