With a margin of just 759 votes (.8%) separating Keisha Lance Bottoms and Mary Norwood in their Atlanta mayoral runoff, a recount will officially decide the successor to current mayor Kasim Reed, who came out on top in a nearly identical scenario eight years ago.
Norwood made clear her intention to call for a recount, as is her right under Georgia elections law, should the final tally show her less than 1% behind Lance Bottoms. Once the small number of remaining provisional votes are checked for validity and the final results are certified, (that total is unlikely to bring Lance Bottoms beyond a 1% margin of victory) a recount will take place. As of now that certification is expected to be finalized on either Saturday or Monday, with the recount to take approximately a week.
Lance Bottoms, for her part, went ahead and declared victory in the race, and while that may seem hasty she has good reason to believe the results will stand.
Back in 2009 Reed’s 714 vote lead was changed by just one single vote in the recount, which Norwood asked for following the final results on election night. In a race that nearly mirrored last night’s, votes were split cleanly along racial lines in a highly competitive runoff that actually saw higher turnout than the original election. Yesterday’s runoff had decent turnout as well, with the 92,000 total votes cast falling just short of the 97,000 cast in the November election. Of course 5,000 votes going one way or another would have made quite the difference in a race decided by less than 800, a fact that Norwood will surely lose sleep over should the results hold.
Taking a look at the numbers, it may have been turnout in Norwood’s home territory of Buckhead that was her undoing. Four key precincts in the western half of the Atlanta neighborhood turned out at rates far below 2009 levels. In fact Norwood took home 700 fewer votes in Ward 8 (comprised of those four precincts) alone than she did in her runoff against Reed. Combined with a lowered turnout in Ward 7, (Buckhead’s eastern half) and it’s easy to see where an extra 1,000 votes could have come from.
On Wednesday Norwood was nowhere to be found, cancelling all her appearances as Lance Bottoms took a victory lap around the Atlanta media circuit. If she’s still taking advice from Reed, (and she is) she’ll likely begin the transition process well before the recount is final. On the day after the election in 2009 Reed was already hard at work assembling his team at City Hall, naming a new chief operating officer and police chief while promising to reach out to Norwood supporters to unite the city under his leadership. You can expect to hear details of Lance Bottoms’ team start to leak out this week as she has little to fear in terms of a recount reversing her lead.
So could the recount change last night’s results? Highly unlikely. The process is more to just be extra sure everything is copacetic and blow away any dark clouds of uncertainty that may linger over the winner’s term as they get settled into their new office at City Hall.
