Possible SPLOST Recount?

Cobb County’s SPLOST election captured some March Madness on Tuesday, and the decision on the 1 percent sales tax could be going into overtime.

With all 153 precincts reporting and all absentee and early ballots counted by 10:30 p.m., the referendum unofficially passed by 79 votes out of the 42,971 cast.

That margin of 0.18 percent was even closer than the September 2005 election that enacted the current Special Purpose Local Option Sales Tax by a comparatively easy 114 votes.

There’s no reason to think that the fierce battled waged between advocates and opponents of the SPLOST extension has come to an end.

As questions arose through the night about recounts of the paper absentee ballots and recanvasses of the electronic votes, Cobb County officials didn’t have the answers.

The “current goal is getting an accurate count of the votes cast,” county spokesman Robert Quigley said in an e-mail at 9:50 p.m. “We will focus on the next steps once we complete the task at hand.”

Quigley said the elections board’s attorney should be able to provide answers Wednesday about what happens next.

The same night that the NCAA men’s Division I basketball tournament began with an overtime game in Dayton (UNC-Asheville beat Arkansas-Little Rock 81-77), overtime seemed a fitting result in Cobb. The vote lead went back and forth between approval and rejection from the time the first numbers came out around 7:30 until the final numbers arrived three hours later.

While the sales tax held the lead most of the night, the “no” side moved ahead by 56 votes in the second-to-last release of vote totals from the Cobb County Board of Elections & Registration. But the final six precincts reversed the result and pushed the SPLOST to the unofficial victory.

That excitement came after a day featuring light turnout across Cobb. Less than 11 percent of the active registered electorate of 392,589 voted in an election with only one issue: whether to extend the SPLOST for four more years.

That penny-per-dollar tax would raise a projected $492 million from Jan. 1, 2012, to Dec. 31, 2015, to pay for roads, parks, public safety improvements and other projects.