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A recount has changed who won the seat for city council in the ward of sipiwiyiniwak by hundreds of votes.
The race for city council was a tight one in the west Edmonton election ward after incumbent Sarah Hamilton elected not to run for council again.
Seven people ran for the open seat, and the top contenders came so close after the first round of hand counting, election officials said the ballots all needed to be examined again.
On Wednesday, Edmonton Elections called a preliminary recount for the city council race as the returning officer believed “there may have been administrative or technical mistakes that caused an error in the count of votes.”
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This meant the race was so tight, the city needed to recount the votes to be sure. After all the ballots from 23 polling stations were counted following Monday’s election, the first and second-place candidates were just six votes apart.
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Better Edmonton candidate Darrell Friesen got 6,060 votes and independent candidate Thu Parmar, who was asked to run for Better Edmonton but declined, got 6,054 votes.
The third-place candidate, Giselle General, got 4,841 votes. She ran in the 2021 election and came in second to the incumbent.
Election workers began counting all of the ballots again on Wednesday afternoon, and about four hours later a dramatic twist showed up in the results.
After the second count, Parmar not only came out in the lead with 6,667 votes, but she beat Friesen by 600 votes. he received 6,040 votes and told Global News afterwards he was conceding the election.
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Official results will be released by noon on Oct. 24.
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