Mullenax Declared Winner After Recount

BARTOW | It’s official: Dick Mullenax is the one.

A recount Thursday showed Mullenax defeated longtime incumbent School Board member Brenda Reddout by 215 votes out of more than 50,000 cast.

Reddout picked up nine votes in the recount but it wasn’t enough to offset Mullenax’s lead from Tuesday’s election.

Election workers spent five hours feeding an estimated 50,852 ballots by hand into vote-counting machines. The final result showed Mullenax with 24,867, or 50.22 percent, to 24,652 votes for Reddout, or 49.78 percent. The totals included provisional ballots that were reviewed and approved by the Polk County Canvassing Board.

The total number of votes were fewer than the number of ballots counted because some voters didn’t make a selection in the School Board race.