BROOKINGS — While the official canvass of the April 9 municipal election on Tuesday night by the Brookings City Council turned up no shocking revelations, there were a few interesting tidbits.

City Clerk Bonnie Foster said turnout topped out at 16% of the city’s 12,897 registered voters, with a total of 2,024 ballots cast. The turnout was just slightly better than the 1,963 voters who took part in the Jan. 30 special election regarding a land sale change at the Brookings Marketplace.

The three City Council candidates on April 9 were incumbent Wayne Avery, newcomer Al Austreim and incumbent Nick Wendell. In the end, both incumbents won, but there was only a 37-vote difference between Wendell and Austreim.

In a conversation with the Brookings Register on Monday, Austreim said he wasn’t going to ask for a recount. That said, he has until 5 p.m. on April 23 before the recount window legally closes.

“My plan is to look forward,” Austreim said. “I’m not going away.”

The election also produced a noteworthy item in the form of overvoting and undervoting. The former occurs when a voter selects all three of the candidates, instead of just two, while the latter occurs when only one of the three candidates is chosen.

“We had 648 undervotes in this election,” Foster noted. “That’s a rather large number.”

There were no overvotes, she added.

There was also a slight bit of humor to be found during the April 9 election — namely, a “living dead” voter.

Foster said there were two men in the system who had the same first name, middle initial and last name — but two birthdates. The older man had died in the last year, but the wrong man was deleted from the system.

“We’re kind of joking about it, because it was the living dead,” she said. “They were able to go back and correct that and the living dead was able to cast their ballot normally by processing an emergency voter card. So we kind of had fun with that one — we’ve never had a living dead voter come back.”

Humor aside, Foster said residents have a responsibility to check on their voter registration status from time to time, especially if they have not been voting. This can be done when they renew their driver’s license or by accessing the Voter Registration Page on the South Dakota Secretary of State’s Office website at https://vip.sdsos.gov/VIPLogin.aspx.

If a voter has an issue with their voter registration, Foster added, they can submit a new voter registration form and file it with the Brookings County Finance Office.  The form is on the secretary of state’s website:  https://sdsos.gov/elections-voting/voting/register-to-vote/default.aspx

— Contact Mondell Keck at mkeck@brookingsregister.com.