Paul Wimmer will hold on to his Tooele County sheriff job for four more years.
Unofficial election results posted by Tooele County Clerk Marilyn Gillette on election night show Wimmer with 67.4 percent of the votes. His opponent, Dean Adams, carried 32.6 percent.
“I am grateful that voters have supported my re-election,” Wimmer said. “I am thankful for all the help and support I had during the campaign. When I ran four years ago, I promised to make some changes and it appears that the public, in general, supports the direction we are going.”
Unless a write-in candidate emerges, Wimmer will advance to the November general election unopposed. No other party nominated a candidate for sheriff.
Other winners, according to the unofficial election night count, include Tom Tripp for County Commission seat A, Kendall Thomas for County Commission seat B, and Alison McCoy for County Auditor.
Tripp won with 55.3 percent of the vote.
Thomas, who sought the Republican nomination after losing two races for County Commission as a Democrat, took the Republican nomination with 56.4 percent of the vote.
McCoy will be the Republican nominee for the newly restored seperate County Auditor with 63.2 percent of the vote.
“It’s amazing that I won,” Thomas said. “My opponent, Brenda Faddis, ran a good campaign. I’m on task with the issues and ready for the general election.”
Tripp also had good things to say about his opponent.
“It was a good election,” Tripp said. “I had some good support. Mitch [Hall] is a good man. I hope he continues to give service. I am ready to be the party’s nominee for the general election.”
Election night results show 6,031 ballots were cast out of 12,593 potential Republican voters, for a turn out of 47.9 percent. Four years ago the voter turnout for the primary was 12.4 percent, according to Gillette.
Not included in the election night vote tally are 303 provisional ballots. The county clerk’s office will validate those ballots over the next two weeks and count those that are eligible.
The final vote will be certified on July 10. That final count will include all mail-in ballots that arrive at the clerk’s office by July 10 that were postmarked no later than June 25, the day before the election.
“With the provisional ballots and vote-by-mail stragglers, we will get close to a 50-percent turnout,” Gillette said.
During the hotly contested 2008 presidential primary with Mitt Romney and John McCain running for the Republican nomination and Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama vying for the Democratic nomination, a total of 25.5 percent of the registered voters in Tooele County from all parties voted.
The 2008 presidential primary was before the Republican Party in Utah closed its primary to affiliated party members only. There were 5,695 Republican ballots cast and 2,663 Democratic ballots cast in the 2008 presidential primary.
In 2009, the first closed Republican Party primary in Utah, there were 9,081 affiliated Republicans in the county, with 250 of those signing up on the day of the election at the polls, and 2,905 voted, for a 37-percent turnout.
The general election on Nov. 6 in Tooele County will feature candidates from the Republican, Democratic, Green, Libertarian, and and Constitutional parties.