Two incumbents in the race for Wake County commissioner lost their bid for re-election Tuesday night after waiting several hours for the votes to be totaled.
District 7 Commissioner John Burns lost to challenger Vickie Adamson, 48 to 52 percent, while District 4 Commissioner Erv Portman lost to challenger Susan Evans, 32 percent to 68 percent.
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Meanwhile, District 1 Commissioner Sig Hutchinson won with 62 percent of the vote against Jeremiah Pierce, while District 2 Commissioner Matt Calabria was re-elected with 52 percent percent of the vote against Lindy Brown.
In District 5, Commissioner James West won with 83 percent of the vote against Robert Finch.
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The votes were slow to roll in, with the first truck full of voting machines arriving the Wake County warehouse for votes to be counted some two hours after the polls closed Tuesday night.
The county is handling election results differently this year. In past elections, vote totals were sent from precincts via modem, but now data readers from the voting machines are driven to a county warehouse for the totals to be retrieved manually. State officials ordered the change to beef up security following the allegations of Russian hacking in the 2016 elections.
Precinct workers drive the election machines to 10 remote locations, where 10 trucks were waiting, county elections director Gary Sims said. Those trucks then drive to the central location for tabulation, Sims said. There are 204 precincts.
"Now you're going start seeing things come in very quickly," Sims said after 9:30 p.m.
School funding key in commissioner primaries
School funding has played a crucial role in the commissioner primaries.
All five commissioners who voted for the county's $1.26 billion annual budget last year faced opposition this spring. Chairwoman Jessica Holmes and Commissioner Greg Ford, who said the budget didn't provide enough money for schools and voted against it, didn't have a primary.
Major democratic donors formed the Women Awake PAC in February and endorsed Brown, Evans and Adamson.
Chairwoman Ann Campbell and other members of the PAC's board supported the incumbent commissioners, but they said the men haven’t provided the Wake County Public School System with enough money in recent years.
The school board last year requested $45 million in additional funding from the county for 2017-18 to keep up with enrollment growth, but the county budget included only $21 million of that. Then-County Manager Jim Hartmann recommended that the school district spend $21 million of its surplus funds to cover much of the rest.
But the incumbents say commissioners have increased county spending on public schools by more than $93 million a year over the last four years and increased local supplements to teachers over three years to bring pay levels to the national average. Schools now account for more than a third of the county's $1.26 billion annual budget – more than half if the costs of paying off the bonds used to build new schools are added.
They argue that Wake County has other needs, from affordable housing to transit to mental health programs, and they cannot continue raising taxes on residents. The county property tax rate has increased by 10.1 cents per $100 valuation since 2014, adding $202 to the annual bill for a $200,000 home.
The purchase of a former golf course for a county park, claims of misleading campaign ads and a complaint filed with the Wake County Board of Elections alleging illegal activity by Women Awake and another PAC backing the challengers all became part of the rancor surrounding the commissioner races.