Kids First Win Machine Vote in Hoboken

Kids First won Hoboken's Board of Education race in Tuesday night's elections, according to preliminary results from the city clerk's office. Absentee ballots and provisional votes were not yet included in the count as of Tuesday night.

While Tom Kluepfel, Jean Marie Mitchell and Ruthy McAllister won the machine votes, it's unclear if absentee ballots and provisional votes are going to make a difference.

It will take until Friday for the absentee ballots to be counted.

Kluepfel earned a total of 3426 votes, Mitchell received 3223 votes and McAllister took 3498 votes.

In the race for the three open school board seats in Hoboken, the Kids First ticket —  Kluepfel, Mitchell and incumbent McAllister all three backed by Mayor Dawn Zimmer — fought to hang on to their board majority.

The other slate in Tuesday's elections was Move Forward, made up of candidates Anthony Oland, Felice Vasquez and Liz Markevitch.

Oland received a total of 2512 votes, Markevitch got 2844 votes and Vazquez got 2488 votes. Independent Patricia Waiters got a total of 987 votes.

"The vote by mails are scary," McAllister said at the Kids First victory party at Court Street. "We won the honest vote, the most important vote to me."

McAllister, the only incumbent running in this election, said she was "proud and happy" to be elected back to the school board.

While happy to win on the machines after being off the board for a year, Mitchell said she is still nervous about the absentee ballots that will still have to be counted.

"I'm worried about the absentee ballots," she said. "That's always on issue."

It wasn't clear as of Tuesday night how many vote by mail ballots were sent into the Hudson County Clerk's office.

Two weeks ago, all seven candidates debated the issues in a public forum.

The school board race was particularly contentious, even for Hoboken standards, complete with a roving political attack ad depicting a Nazi flag in a urinal last month. 

In the senatorial race, Hudson County native U.S. Senator Bob Menendez beat Joe Kyrillos. Hoboken's Congressman Albio Sires easily won re-election on Tuesday.

Hobokenites also decided three public questions in Hoboken. As a result of Tuesday's elections, municipal elections will be moved to November. Run-off elections were eliminated and rent control was upheld in the city of Hoboken.

On the first question 7,621 voted to eliminate run-off elections, while 5,295 voted to keep them. Hoboken also chose to move the municipal elections to November by a large margin with 8,475 voting "yes" and 2,485 voting "no."

This means that the 2013 mayoral election will take place in November 2013, rather than May.

Hobokenites also overwhelmingly came out for President Barack Obama. On Tuesday, 11,611 Hobokenites voted for Obama, while 5,843 voted for Republican candidate Mitt Romney.