American Fork City Council election results won’t be certified for a couple more weeks, give or take, but additional ballots counted today and reported this afternoon take the apparent results from likely to virtually certain.

We won’t have a clear picture of turnout until the vote is certified, but if turnout is anything like the 38% we saw in 2021, there could be another thousand ballots out there and yet to be counted.

That said, with Ernie John leading Ken Sumsion by more than 500 votes for the third available seat on the council, a change in the final outcome is extremely unlikely.

Here are the unofficial results as of this evening, according to the Utah County website. (Rudimentary precinct data is available there too. Don’t get excited about the two precincts with zero votes. At the time of the primary election, there were only ten registered voters there, at least on the books, and none of them voted in the primary.)

Unofficial winners of four-year terms on the American Fork City Council are incumbent Clark Taylor, Tim Holley, and Ernie John. They’ll be sworn in just after New Year’s Day.

Clark Taylor3,046 votes25.41%
Tim Holley2,824 votes23.56%
Ernie John2,429 votes20.27%
Ken Sumsion1,927 votes16.08%
Jeff Shorter1,760 votes14.68%

Looking simply at numbers, this is an especially strong showing by Holley, who finished fourth in the primary voting. It’s a solid performance by John, who was third in the primary. It’s no surprise at all that Taylor, a popular incumbent, finished first in both elections.

Sumsion, a former Utah State Representative, finished second in the primary but slipped to fourth in the general election. Shorter, who served a four-year term on the council from 2014 through 2017, finished fifth in the general election after finishing sixth in the primary behind Austin Duke, who dropped out of the general election before the November ballots were printed.

Hearty congratulations to the winners; our thanks to the rest.

The Woman Next Door

Congratulations also to Kelly Smith, a former American Fork resident and still an active friend of all things AF. (One might even say she’s All About American Fork.) She won a second term on the Cedar Hills City Council. She finished first in a four-way race for three available seats.

Image credit: generated by DALL-E