INDIAN RIVER COUNTY — At the end of a day that started before dawn and a rivalry that started 21 months ago when Kay Clem resigned, Leslie Swan emerged victorious Tuesday in the race for Indian River County Supervisor of Elections.
The vote came down to Swan getting nearly 70 percent of the vote – or 18,803 votes – and Harpring getting 30 percent – or 8,240 votes, giving Swan the largest margin of victory of all the county races on Tuesday.
“I am absolutely thrilled,” Swan said of having received the overwhelming majority of the vote. She added that she was proud of having run a positive campaign.
Swan was ahead when the absentee and early votes were tabulated and she maintained that early lead throughout the evening as precincts were reported.
Swan’s war chest totaled more than $73,000 as compared to the nearly $52,000 raised by Harpring.
The Supervisor of Elections contest was probably the most controversial of the category of “constitutional offices” so called because the county is mandated to have those offices by the State of Florida.
A few weeks ago, there was a dust-up over an errant crease in the ballots which landed in the “strike zone” of candidates on both the Republican and Democrat-Nonpartisan ballots.
Swan conducted two tests of the ballots through the voting machines and the crease was shown not to result in erroneous votes in the sample tested.
Then on Friday when absentee votes were counted, it was discovered that 122 of the first 5,000 ballots counted had been torn by the Supervisor of Elections’ letter-opening machine and had to be hand-tabulated.
