updated with percentages
It appears that Arapahoe County coroner Michael Doberson has won re-election, according to updated results the Arapahoe County clerk and recorder’s office posted Monday afternoon.
The results, posted on the clerk’s web site an hour ago, have Doberson winning, 90,247 to 88,925 votes. That’s 50.37 percent to 49.63 percent, which at this point puts it out of recount range.
Really, it never should have even been close. Doberson is a veteran forensic pathologist with a good reputation, and his challenger was a local attorney who said he’d hire people to conduct autopsies.
This was a hotly contested election, with Doberson, a Democrat facing a challenge from Jay Ledbetter, a Republican. It got downright dirty too.
“This is a coroner’s race,” Doberson said, according to an Aurora Sentinel story. “It’s about who is the most qualified, who is the most experienced. The last thing I expected was any mudslinging or these underhanded tactics. I am not a politician, I am a physician. This certainly isn’t anything they taught me in medical school.”
Mary Whitley, Arapahoe deputy clerk and recorder, told me last week they were finishing up with counting and there were about 200 ballots with signature discrepancies (mostly that means voters didn’t sign them and needed to come in to do so or they wouldn’t be counted).
The larger chunk was some 6,700 provisional ballots the clerk’s office had yet to finish sorting through late last week to determine whether they were cast by valid voters. At that point, the margin between the two was about 1,000 votes. Now, it has grown to 1,322.
I tried calling Whitley this afternoon to ask whether there are more votes to tally and didn’t hear back from her right away. Based on what she told me last week, the vote totals then versus now, and how the votes are trending, it doesn’t appear to me that Ledbetter can catch Doberson.
We wrote an editorial in October about the politicization of coroner’s races, mentioning the Arapahoe coroner’s race in particular.
The challenger, lawyer Jay Ledbetter, distributed campaign literature accusing the coroner’s office of manipulating evidence in criminal trials to “convict an innocent person” rather than admit error.
Ledbetter later retracted the allegation, saying he had gotten bad information. But the damage is done, and given the low-profile nature of coroner’s races, it is anyone’s guess as to whether voters will get the real story before casting their ballots.
This is one example of how election politics can distort a coroner’s race. We think it’s time to consider taking politics out of the process and allow counties to appoint the most qualified professionals as coroners.
