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The Mat-Su Borough mayor's race isn't over quite yet.

Charlie Fannon, the former Wasilla police chief who trailed by six votes after the final tally of absentee and questioned ballots Sunday, has asked for a recount.

Borough Clerk Sandra Dillon has approved the recount and scheduled it to begin Thursday. Certification of the mayor's race, initially set for Monday, has been delayed to a special Assembly meeting Oct. 27.

Fannon said Monday night that he decided to seek the recount after hearing that recounts of AccuVote-tallied results in other elections here and in other states have sometimes found an error rate of as much as one vote per precinct. Since he trails incumbent Mayor Tim Anderson by only half a dozen votes and the borough has 33 precincts, the prospects are encouraging, Fannon said.

"It seemed like sort of a no-brainer to go for the odds and see if it comes back accurate," he said.

Fannon said he had received additional campaign contributions to help cover the cost of the recount. He will have to pay $3,300 -- $100 for each precinct.

Anderson said he wasn't surprised by the recount request and added that any errors found are as likely to fall in his favor as in Fannon's.

"I think it was expected," he said. "And recounts are not necessarily a bad thing. The votes should be counted correctly."

After the initial vote tally on election night Oct. 7, Fannon led Anderson by 69 votes, with a third candidate, Steve Menard, trailing far behind. A canvassing board spent about two weeks sorting through more than 2,000 absentee and questioned ballots to determine which were valid, and those were counted Sunday.

AccuVote is an electronic system that scans marked ballots and tallies the results. It has been in use in most precincts in Alaska state elections for several years and in Anchorage since last year. A recount of this spring's Anchorage mayoral race produced a change of only three votes out of more than 63,000 cast.