The city of Revere is poised to approve mayoral candidate Dan Rizzo's request for a recount in that contest, which would likely mean that the outcome won't be official until early next month.
Current returns show Patrick Keefe, who became Revere's acting mayor when former mayor Brian Arrigo joined the Healey Administration, winning the mayor's job with 4,932 votes, compared to 4,565 for Rizzo.
Rizzo did not immediately respond to a request for comment Monday. But in a Facebook post last week, Rizzo, who served as mayor from 2012 to 2015, seemed to imply that votes not cast at the polls on Election Day may not have been fully counted.
"With early voting, mail-in voting, and absentee voting, it is important to me and our committee that everyone that took advantage of these additional ways to vote, as opposed to on election day, had their votes counted," Rizzo said in the post.
The post did not offer specific evidence that those or any other votes had not been counted.
Paul Fahey, Revere's election commissioner, told GBH News that at least ten supporters of Rizzo's in each of Revere's six wards have submitted petitions for a recount, meeting the threshold required by state law.
"He filed everything he needed to file," Fahey said of Rizzo.
The city's Board of Election Commissioners will likely set a recount date of Dec. 2 when they meet Monday evening, Fahey said.
During the campaign, Rizzo sought to tie Keefe to what he cast as the failures of the Arrigo administration, including a massive amount of new rental construction along Revere Beach. Rizzo promised that, if elected, he would immediately seek a moratorium on new apartment construction.
When Rizzo was ousted by Arrigo in 2015, a recount yielded a final margin of just 108 votes. Rizzo unsuccessfully challenged Arrigo again in 2019.
In his own Facebook post, Keefe called Rizzo's decision to seek a recount "disheartening, but not surprising," and said Rizzo "seems to regularly question the integrity of any election he does not win."
