Judge tells county to start recount of Central Bucks votes as reorganization looms

Next week's Central Bucks School District reorganization will likely go on as planned after a judge Thursday evening said the county can start recounting votes in last month's election.

Hours after it was filed, Bucks County Common Pleas Judge Wallace Bateman Jr. granted an emergency injunction Thursday night allowing the Bucks County Board of Elections to start the recount of the ballots in three districts regions as early as Friday.

The Board of Election will now most likely conduct a machine count of the ballots, said attorney David Conn, who represents the three affected Democrat school board members.

The three winning school board members sought the emergency injunction on one of 15 petitions filed by Republicans seeking a recount of November's election. Bateman's order Thursday applies to all the recount petitions.

Conn, who represents Karen Smith, Dana Foley and Heather Reynolds, said he asked the court to move forward with a recount to avoid "chaos and confusion."

The district will on Monday, Dec. 4 hold their annual reorganization meeting, where board leadership and committee membership is picked as well as the awarding of district contracts for district solicitors.

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That meeting will also mark the dramatic change in board makeup with five newly elected Democrats joining incumbent Democrat Mariam Mahmud, and handing the party a 6-3 majority for the first time in recent memory. The change follows more than two years of ongoing community tensions and bitter divisions over partisan culture wars.

But the new board cannot be sworn in without a certificate issued by the Board of Elections, which cannot be issued until an outstanding recount challenge is resolved.

On Nov. 20, Republicans in 15 polling places across Central Bucks regions 1, 2, and 3 filed petitions challenging the results and requested a hand recount citing allegations of “fraud or error.”

The petition was submitted by Chalfont residents John Anderson, Joseph O’Donnell and Lisa Leitzo. It was not immediately known if emergency injunctions were sought against the other petitions.

The three Democrats in those regions won their respective races by hundreds of votes, unofficial election results show.

Smith and Foley each took 54% of the vote in races against their GOP challengers Dr. Steve Mass in Region 1 and Glenn Schloeffel in Region 3, respectively; Reynolds took 53% of the vote against incumbent board President Dana Hunter’s 47% in Region 2.

"We are totally willing to have the recount take place and we would like it to happen as expediently as possible so that our swearing-in is not delayed," Smith added Thursday evening. "We’re quite certain that the recount will show that we are the fair winners of this election; it wasn’t even close."

The cost of the recount will be borne by taxpayers, Conn said.

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Bucks County spokesman James O'Malley confirmed that the county Board of Elections can’t certify the three challenged Central Bucks School Board races until the court either orders a recount, dismisses the petitions or the complaints are withdrawn.

If the court orders a recount of any petitions, the Board of Elections is ready to do it, O’Malley said. A machine recount can be done possibly within a day, but the GOP challengers are asking for a hand recount, which if ordered can take longer.

Under the Pennsylvania Code, a school district must reorganize sometime during the first week of December. Another section of the code says that outgoing board members terms end on the first Monday of December following a municipal election.

The school code does not speak to the effects of delays in certification of election results, according to Mackenzie Christiana, spokeswoman for the Pennsylvania School Boards Association.

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This article originally appeared on Bucks County Courier Times: Bucks County judge orders recount of CBSD ballots in 3 regions Friday.