Bremerton councilmember trails in early results for peculiar redo election
Feb 9, 2022, 10:57 AM
(Kitsap County Auditor's Office)
(Kitsap County Auditor's Office)
While most votes during this week’s February special election have pertained to bonds and levies, in Bremerton, residents cast ballots in a peculiar redo of a November city council election.
Check results for February 2022’s special election
In the general election in November 2021, incumbent Bremerton Councilmember Mike Simpson faced off against challenger Ann Mockler in the race for the District 6 seat.
But after it was revealed that hundreds of ballots had mistakenly been sent to registered District 5 voters, the situation began to unravel. By late October, 36 of those District 5 ballots had already been filled out and returned. Eventually, final tallies showed Simpson besting Mockler by just three votes, putting the race well within the margin to have been affected by the erroneous ballots.
After the results were finalized, a Kitsap Superior Court judge ordered Bremerton to rerun the council race as part of February’s regularly scheduled special election. While Mockler dismissed the redo as little more than “an inconvenience,” Simpson was substantially more troubled.
“I won the election with three votes,” he told KING 5. “This has done nothing to improve the relationship the auditor has with the voters to build up integrity.”
According to Kitsap County Auditor Paul Andrews, the mishap was driven by changes to Bremerton’s precincts. While the city’s precincts were recently amended to account for population shifts, its council districts remained the same, leading to confusion over voters residing near the border between Districts 5 and 6.
After Tuesday’s initial tallies for the election redo, the race remains tight, with Mockler holding an early 16-vote advantage over Simpson. Simpson had previously defeated Mockler in 2019 by a 73-vote margin. But after he was found to have violated Bremerton’s city charter by spending over a month working overseas in Japan, his seat was vacated, triggering a rematch with Mockler in November of 2021.
