Council candidate slate set

A total of seven candidates for city council and three candidates for justice of the peace of Boulder Township will face off in the primary election scheduled for June 11.

Candidates for council include the incumbents who currently hold the seats up for election.

The candidates for council are (in alphabetical order):Denise Ashurt, Tyler Barton, Matt Fox, Sherri Jorgensen, Daniel R. “Dan” Peterson, Susan Reams, and Tom Tyler.

Addressing the mechanism of the election, City Clerk Tami McKay said in an email, “The primary election on June 11, 2024 will be held for the purpose of eliminating candidates in excess of a figure double the number of council members to be elected. If no candidate receives a majority of the voters casting ballots in that election, the names of the candidate(s) receiving the highest number of votes equal to double the number of council members to be elected shall be placed on the general election ballot on Nov. 5, 2024.”

Here’s how it will work, using the 2021 election as an example.

In order to avoid a run-off in the general election in November, a candidate for council has to get a majority based on ballots cast, not votes cast.

Those differ because there are two open seats, but not all voters will register votes for two candidates. In the 2021 election, there were also two empty seats and a total of 7,869 votes were cast on 4,111 ballots in the April primary.

Sherri Jorgensen, with 2,227 votes, bested all other candidates and got more than half of the number of ballots cast and won one of the open seats. That left one seat open and the next two top vote-getters from the primary (Matt Fox and Cokie Booth) faced off in the general election in June. Fox won that race.

After Boulder City and other municipalities changed their election schedules from odd-numbered years as had been the case traditionally, to even-numbered years to align with other county elections in 2022, Booth again faced off with then-incumbent James Howard Adams in the general election and bested him by 136 votes and took office in late November of 2022.

In addition to Fox and Jorgensen, who are running as incumbents, Ashurst has experience in BC politics as a current member of the Historic Preservation Commission.

At the county level, there are three people running to replace the retiring Victor Miller, who has served as both justice of the peace and municipal judge in BC for more than 40 years. The candidates are: Steven Morris, Lauren Szafranski, and Christopher R. Tilman.

Those three candidates will be on the June primary ballot with the top two moving to the general election in November.