No one had signed up to be an election judge in tiny Taopi this year, so Mayor Mary Huntley and City Clerk Jim Kiefer stepped up.
The problem, though: state law says election judges can’t be on the ballot, so Huntley and Kiefer, who are brother and sister, didn’t file for reelection, says the Post Bulletin.
In fact, no one filed for either position, or for the open city council seat.
With no names on the ballot for local positions, it came down to a write-in campaign.
There are 40 registered voters in Taopi, 25 miles southeast of Austin and not far from Adams and the Iowa border.
And the election results were:
Huntley was re-elected mayor and Kiefer was re-elected clerk. Eric Boe was the write-in winner for the council seat.
Huntley and Kiefer are no strangers to city government. She was city clerk from 1976-2008; he was mayor from 1984-2008. Four years ago, they decided to switch positions and the voters obliged.
The two are ready to hand over the reins, if anyone else is interested, they told the paper.
“If somebody else wanted the job, it would be theirs,” Kiefer said. “My sister would be very happy, too, if someone else wanted to (be mayor).”
“Between him and I, we’ve been the clerk and the mayor for a long time,” said Huntley, an attorney in Austin. “If there was anybody else interested, we were willing to step aside. We didn’t file for it thinking that someone else would step in and take it. But they didn’t. They just wrote our names back in.”
