Earlier in the evening, after the full returns were announced, District 1 candidate Dow Fogleman and District 7 candidate Mary Klentzman were told they had won election to their respective seats.
But at about 9:45 p.m., school board attorney John Gauntt told the Telegram he had questions about election protocol after reading comments by another school district official in Saturday’s Telegram.
In the Saturday article, John Hancock, assistant superintendent of administration and student services, said candidates who receive the most votes in each district would be declared the winner. Gauntt said that statement led him to start researching the district’s election bylaws. That search, he said, did not immediately produce clear direction about how to determine a winner.
Ann McGeehan, an official in the Secretary of State’s election division, told the Telegram on Saturday night that while most school elections require a majority vote to win an election, local school boards can adopt rules to allow election by plurality vote.
In a election guided by the rules of plurality, Fogleman would have won in District 1 with 77 votes and incumbent Virginia Suarez would have been second with 58, followed by Garry Smith with 23.
In the District 7 election for a one-year unexpired term, Klentzman would have won with 165 votes. A’Lisa Ozment, with 113 votes, was second; Elwyn Johnston, 91, and Bill Gorden, 33.
Mrs. Klentzman’s campaign manager, Kay Quicksall, said Saturday night that Mrs. Klentzman and Fogleman would have a legal response by Monday to the confusion.
There has been a precedence of pluralities determining election results in Temple ISD elections, she said.
Quicksall said that Mrs. Klentzman and Fogleman both asked during candidate orientation if the election outcome would be determined by a plurality or majority vote. She said the candidates were told it would be decided with a plurality vote, Quicksall said
“Now at the end of the election it’s changed,” she said.
Gauntt said he was not certain that, under the district’s election bylaws, a candidate could outright win the election without a clear majority. He said he believes that with more than two candidates in each district and no candidate winning 50 percent of the vote, Texas election code calls for a runoff. He said a final decision might not be known until Monday at the earliest.
Hancock, who was in charge of the election, stood by his interpretation of the rules. He said Saturday night that board bylaws state that the candidate with the most votes wins.
Gauntt said that since 1993 the Texas Education Code called for a majority election with run-off elections in the case of multiple candidates without a simple majority. He said the board could have changed the rules to have plurality vote elections, but he was unaware of any action taken by the board to do so. Thus, he said, the majority vote statute still stands.
If that is the case, the Temple school district has been operating on the assumption that elections could be decided by plurality vote for 14 years.
Saturday night, Hancock said officials were going over board minutes from past meetings to determine if such a change was made.
“We are go back and discern what is correct,” Hancock said. “What we want to do is make the right decision.”
Ms. Suarez said she was disappointed at the possibility of a runoff.
“After 18 years of being committed to something, it hurts to know that I wasn’t re-elected at this point,” Ms. Suarez said. “If Monday comes and we find that indeed is the case, I will be ready to follow through with it,” she said of the possible runoff.
Fogleman said that precedence in previous Temple school elections of using a plurality of votes should be followed and no runoff should take place.
“It’s an underhanded maneuver in an attempt to change the will of the voters,” Fogleman said.
Fogleman said he would have a legal challenge to a runoff. But should a legal challenge fail, Fogleman said he would stay in a runoff election. “I deserve to continue to move forward,” he said.
Mrs. Ozment said that whatever happens she would run again next year.
“I was resigned to the loss and already looking forward to next year and planning on that when Dr. Hancock called and said there might be a runoff,” she said. “I had already said that we would come back and try again. I got a call from Elwyn Johnston’s camp saying they would support me in a runoff, and I appreciate that.”
Meanwhile, unopposed incumbent David Pennington was elected to his District 6 seat.
