Mike Wilson calls for Indio election recount
Update – 12/17/18:
Former Indio Mayor Mike Wilson has chosen to end the recount process for the Indio City Council District 2 seat.
Read: Mike Wilson ends recount process for Indio City Council seat
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Indio Mayor Mike Wilson has officially called for a recount in the race for Indio’s District 2 City Council seat.
“The official recount request was made at 7:46 a.m. this morning,” Wilson told News Channel 3 Tuesday. “I’ll have no comments until after the recount process. Thank you.”
Indio’s Administrative Services Manager PJ Gagajena told KESQ that the swearing-in ceremony will go on as planned on Wednesday at 5 p.m., with Fermon being sworn-in as a councilman.
“If the Registrar provides us with different results, that will be addressed at a later time,” said Gagajena.
Job Huerta, Fermon’s Director of Voter Engagement issued a statement to KESQ Tuesday night:
“The election is over. The residents have spoken. We are excited about {tomorrow’s} swearing-in ceremony. Most importantly we look forward to the work of improving our communities. Despite the clear margin of victory, we understand not everyone is ready to move forward. We are hopeful that the end of this process brings them the clarity they deserve.”
Wilson has expressed his intention to call for a recount even before the results were finalized; earlier last week, he issued the following statement, explaining his rationale behind the eventual decision.
“It has become extremely clear in this Campaign a practice of “ballot harvesting” took place and those ballots were delivered on election day to stuff absentee ballot boxes. Though not necessarily illegal, in my opinion and many supporters opinion, it is a very unethical practice that has occured in California this election and is the only State to allow it. These practices, until now, only occured in other countries that regularly have questionable and fraudulent elections.
Mathematically and statistically those extra ballots just don’t show up in a block after three weeks of counting showed this race would be decided by a very small handful of votes,” Wilson said.. “Something is amiss here and we intend to explore it”. We are aware of many still uncounted and unprocessed ballots that we know are in our favor as well. Taking this all into consideration, we intend to ask the County Registrar for an official recount.”
Wilson’s final vote total was 1,772, while Indio native Fermon garnered 1,920.
After the election was certified, Wilson doubled-down on his objection to the results and the alleged ballot-harvesting, saying the use of the practice was “third world country tactics.”
When polls first closed over a month ago, Fermon trailed the incumbent by three votes.
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Noticias en español: Telemundo 15
