District 3 City Councilmember Justin Outling – who finished 425 votes down in the mayor’s race – has not conceded.

According to the unofficial results, Mayor Nancy Vaughan won reelection on Tuesday, July 26 by a slim margin.

Vaughan unofficially had 13,932 votes for 43.05 percent while Outling finished the night with 13,507 votes for 41.74 percent.  However, there are still absentee and mail-in votes from military personnel that have not been counted, and the vote totals are still unofficial.

A total of 4,921 write-in votes were cast in the mayor’s race, presumably the majority of those were for Chris Meadows who announced on June 13 he was running a write-in campaign for mayor and had the support of the Guilford County Republican Party.

Outling in a post on his Facebook page on Wednesday afternoon, July 27, stated, “Thank you for all your support! I wanted to update you on where we are in this election process …

“There is an unknown amount of absentee votes and mail in votes from service numbers (I am working to understand how many).  I believe in counting every vote and we are waiting for those votes to be counted.  If it pulls the margin within 1% (and we are now at 1.3%) then there could be a recount before results can be certified.

“Thank you for hanging with us the votes are counted!

“(Maybe it’s the lawyer on me but I have to wait until the final verdict to call the case closed.)”

Most of the news outlets in the area have declared Vaughan the winner based on the unofficial vote totals.