His opponent beat him by more than 4,000 votes. He’s not ready to accept he lost

Just when you thought the 2018 election was over, one Bradenton City Council race won’t go away just yet.

Bradenton’s Ward 4 race will get one final look on Tuesday morning as Councilman Bemis Smith wants to ensure his lopsided defeat on Nov. 6 to Bill Sanders was legitimate.

The official results have Sanders beating the long-time incumbent by more than 4,000 votes, sweeping every single city precinct. The total number of votes in the Ward 4 race were 17,595, with Sanders receiving 10,856 to Smith’s 6,739.

What Smith finds odd about the results is it runs similar to the race in Ward 3 where incumbent Patrick Roff defeated his challenger, Cornelia Winn, by an almost identical margin. Except even Winn won a precinct or two.

Smith said it’s just one of those election oddities that doesn’t make sense to him and he simply wants to put to rest that is what the voters decided.

The ballots will not be recounted during the review.

“If I lost by 1,000 votes, I could accept that, but I can’t think of one negative thing that stands out that would make my race so different from the other race,” Smith said. “If it was a case of city voters just wanting to see change, then what was it that made my race the exact opposite from the other?”

Smith said it’s not sour grapes.

“It’s what I call sleep medication,” he said. I just want to be able to sleep at night. It’s not technically a recount. I’m not looking for missed votes and, to be honest, I’m not expecting anything to be different. I just want to make sure there wasn’t some kind of computer glitch that switched the numbers and we’ll know that pretty early on.”

Ward 1 Councilman Gene Gallo will be at the elections office with an attorney from St. Petersburg monitoring the review. Gallo said his daughter used to work at an elections office for many years and told him how easy it is for human error to affect the vote count.

Gallo said for Smith to lose by such uniformity in every precinct doesn’t make a lot of sense.

“We’ll start off looking at two precincts and if they don’t show any issues then we’ll know,” Gallo said. “Obviously, if we see an issue in those two precincts, we’ll keep going.”

Supervisor of Elections Mike Bennett said it’s every candidate’s right to review the ballots, but he doesn’t expect anything to change.

“We ran all the tests and everything checked out,” Bennett said. “This isn’t uncommon for someone to want to take a look at the ballots, but it’s usually something involving a smaller election like Trailer Estates or Bayshore Gardens. I think that Smith’s loss came as such a surprise to a lot of people, they just want to take a look.”

Bennett said it’s not a recount and ballots will not go back through the machines. The ballots will not be allowed to be touched, but candidates can review them by elections office staff showing them each ballot.

That’s why Gallo said they will probably know early on after they check the first two precincts and will make a decision from there whether to continue the review.

“If nothing shows up then I’ll do some soul searching to see what I could have done to make everybody so mad,” Smith said. “But really, this is just for peace of mind.”

Sanders could not immediately be reached for comment on Monday afternoon, but it had been a bitter campaign from the moment the two first squared off in a Tiger Bay debate. Things spiraled downward from there with Sanders filing criminal complaints accusing Smith of wrongdoing.

If the election stands, it will be the first time a challenger has defeated an incumbent on the city council in 11 years.

This story was originally published November 26, 2018 at 2:04 PM.