Orange supervisor race came down to mere 5 votes

Family members of Shannon Abbs who voted in Tuesday’s election: six. Votes by which she appears to have upset an incumbent for a seat on the Orange County Board of Supervisors: five.

Mark Johnson, the supervisor she upset, said Wednesday evening that he doesn’t know if he’ll ask for a recount.

“I have not made a decision on that,” he said. “I’m looking into it.”

Abbs’ win was certified Wednesday. That began Johnson’s 10-day window to petition for a recount of his 651-to-646 loss, said the county’s general registrar, Raymond Cady.

All but a few of the roughly 1,600 votes cast in the election were electronic and are unlikely to change in a recount, Cady said.

The only paper ballots counted in the contest were 27 mailed-in absentee ballots, he said. There were 81 absentee ballots total.

Five mailed-in absentee votes were rejected because voters filled out the accompanying forms wrong, but they have been saved in case of a challenge.

And Cady said there is unlikely to be a Florida-esque hanging-chad fiasco in Orange County.

“These are very clear paper ballots that have big boxes beside the candidates’ names, and it would be hard to not to mark where they should have been marked,” he said.

Abbs, 36, said a civics class at the University of Virginia stoked her interest in the seat.

For a class six years ago, she followed an election involving Johnson. That project opened her eyes to the hot issues in Orange County and was the genesis of the campaign that led, for now at least, to her unseating of Johnson.

“That’s basically when I figured ... ‘Six years from now I might do this,’” she said.

Now, she said, she’s excited to get started governing.

She’ll be meeting with the county administrator at the end of this week to begin learning the ropes and will be sworn in at a January meeting of the board, if all goes as she plans.

She said her first focus will be a potential budget shortfall the county faces.

Maintaining services will be difficult, she said.

“We cannot continue to burden our taxpayers with increases,” she said.