Update, December 16, 3:45 p.m.: Dean Zarkos, who originally requested a recount of Los Alamitos
City Council votes from the Nov. 2 election, this week asked the county Registrar of Voters to end the process. Zarkos, an incumbent, had come in fourth in a race where three seats were open.
Fullerton City Council candidate Doug Chaffee, whose recount request was not mentioned in our original post, also asked the Registrar to discontinue that recount.
]
Original Post, December 13, 3:23 p.m.: Folks who show up to the Los Alamitos City Council chambers tonight expecting to see the swearing in of newcomer Warren Kusumoto and incumbents Troy Edgar and Gerri Graham-Mejia will be disappointed to discover they've walked into a boring old planning commission meeting instead.
See, despite what the Orange County Register reported today, the swearing-in ceremony is not tonight. It happened last Monday, Dec. 6.
Oopsiecheck of the city website bears this out. There you will find the Dec. 6 meeting agenda. Item No. 6 on the agenda was “Special Orders of the Day,” where the Nov. 2 General Municipal Election results were certified, a presentation was made to outgoing Councilman Constantine “Dean” Zarkos and the oath of office was read to Kusumoto, Edgar and Graham-Mejia, who were presented Certificates of Elections.
Someone at the Register apparently got the message before this post went live, and Roxana Kopetman's story, while still carrying the incorrect title “Recount Looms as Los Al Swears In New Council Members,” has been changed to remove the references to a swearing-in tonight.
What remains in the condensed piece is correct: Zarkos, who came in fourth place in the race for
three open seats, requested recount of all the votes. The Orange County Registrar of Voters began the process this morning–Monday, Dec. 13–Registrar Neal Kelley just confirmed for the Weekly.
Kelley also pointed those interested to a special Los Alamitos Recount page. As of this post, it shows five precincts have been recounted, five remain to be recounted and 1,184 votes have been counted again so far.
His office's earlier certified results, which like the swearing-in ceremony can still be reversed, show Zarkos finished 24 votes behind Graham-Mejia. It was actually a tight race among the top six (of seven) candidates for three open seats. Here is what is posted on the Registrar site under Nov. 2 results:
| WARREN KUSUMOTO | 1,685 | 17.9% |
| TROY EDGAR | 1,624 | 17.3% |
| GERRI L. GRAHAM-MEJIA | 1,450 | 15.4% |
| CONSTANTINE “DEAN” ZARKOS | 1,426 | 15.2% |
| DEAN GROSE | 1,357 | 14.4% |
| BRAD SHERIDAN | 1,331 | 14.2% |
| JOHANNA A. SCHLEUTER | 529 | 5.6% |
OC Weekly Editor-in-Chief Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before “graduating” to OC Weekly in 1995 as the alternative newsweekly’s first calendar editor.