A day after the April 7 election, just who would occupy the three Plainfield Village Board seats that were up for grabs in the race remained unclear.
A slim margin of votes in the election left many candidates hesitant to declare any sort of victory, or concede defeat, until provisional and absentee ballots are counted.
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Will County Clerk Nancy Schultz Voots said those ballots would be entered into the tallies April 21.
“If you don’t win big, don’t start celebrating until another two weeks,” she said the day after the election.
Kendall County election officials also said they would be adding provisional and absentee ballots in the coming weeks.
In the race for three village board seats, just 23 votes separated the top vote-getter in the race from the fourth-place finisher.
That candidate, Brian Wojowski, was just three votes behind the third-place candidate, Michael A. Lambert, according to unofficial tallies.
Incumbent Bill Lamb topped the pile after Tuesday night, according to unofficial Will and Kendall county results, with just less than 19 percent of the vote.
Despite being out front, Lamb said April 8 that he was nowhere near declaring victory.
“It’s awfully close,” he said. “People tell me my probability is very good, but I’m sort of the wait-and-see type, for better or worse.”
The next highest vote-getter, Planning Commission member Ed O’Rourke, took about 18.8 percent of the vote. .
Lambert, a former trustee and area architect, received about 18.4 percent of votes cast, according to the unofficial tally.
But Wojowski would need to pick up just four votes in the April 21 count to best Lambert and secure that final trustee slot.
Mark Allen Chmura, a Naperville fire captain, received about 14.4 percent, while John G. Green garnered about 11 percent of the ballots, according to unofficial results.
Chmura sent out a concession statement the day after the election, thanking his family and friends for their support and pledging to remain involved in Plainfield’s future.
“I will continue to be active in the community to promote integrity, transparency and accountability,” he said in the statement.
Wojowski and Lambert did not return calls for comment the day after the election.
O’Rourke said April 8 that he was not ready to claim a win until any outstanding ballots were tabulated.
“I’m still worried about that a little bit because the race was so tight,” he said. “Every vote did count on this one.”
O’Rourke said he is excited at the prospect of taking on elected office if he does win , and that his first race for elected office was a unique experience.
“I would recommend it to anybody,” he said. “You don’t really understand it until you go through it.”
O’Rourke admitted it will be a couple long weeks until those absentee and provisional ballots come in.
“Probably even more so for Michael Lambert and Brian Wojowski,” he said.
Mayor Michael Collins said the small difference in the votes earned by the top four candidates was unprecedented in recent memory.
“I’ve been involved with having races since 1989,” he said, “and I’ve never seen one this close.”
Collins said that, at one point on Election Night as the returns came in, just a few votes separated the whole pool of candidates.
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Still, Collins said he wished there would have been more people voting in the race.
Local elections are important because those elected officials are often a citizen’s first point of contact with their government, he said.
Will County saw about 14.92 percent voter turnout out of 393,088 registered voters, while about 11.5 percent of Kendall County’s 66,007 registered voters cast their ballots in this race.
“I’m disappointed in the voter turnout, but that’s not to take away from any of the candidates,” Collins said.
Collins said that he looks forward to working with whoever secures those three trustee seats, whoever they are.
“The complexion of the board changes with each election cycle,” he said. “I imagine there’s going to be some changes, but I hope that the individuals that are going to be elected are civic-minded and visionary.”
Twitter: @JournoGeoffZ