O’Brien thanked his family, volunteers and the voters, but also his opponent.
“It was an honor running against Mr. Kelly,” O’Brien said. “He conducted himself with integrity and it was a joy to work with him during this election. I hope he continues his political involvement.”
In the Rivanna supervisor race, 1,982 people voted. Almost 58 percent voted for O’Brien, to almost 42 percent for Kelly.
Sheridan, who is the brother of Commissioner of the Revenue Mel Sheridan and whose family owns Sheridan Funeral Home, thanked his volunteers and voters, but acknowledged what a big part his family played.
“Everyone should be so lucky to be surrounded by such a loyal group of people,” Sheridan said. “It was wonderful having them at my side.”
Sheridan won over his opponent Elizabeth Franklin by almost the same margin. Of the 1,263 votes cast, he took 721 votes (57 percent) to Franklin’s 537 votes (42 percent).
The Review asked all candidates how the campaign changed them.
Only two responded.
Franklin said she lost weight.
“Campaigning is grueling work!” Franklin wrote in an email. “Knocking on some 850 doors between May and November, I felt I became almost umbilically attached to the people in my district. Their lives, their worries, their aspirations became mine as I went door to door, met folks and asked their top concerns about the county. I wrote down their feedback, I peered into their lives, and I learned that more people than I ever imagined are struggling to make ends meet and worry they will be taxed out of their own county. My biggest regret is that I will not be able to stand up for all those people now.”
Franklin added that campaigning also gave her a clearer sense of her district.
“I became acutely aware how much Columbia is its own unique district with its own set of circumstances and priorities,” she said. “While my door-to-door information gathering was far from scientific, the concerns expressed by people of my district clearly differed in many ways from the conversations coming out of more suburban parts of Fluvanna. That awareness altered how I determined to govern and make decisions if elected. Increasingly, I saw my obligation not to some indefinable ‘good of the county’ but first and foremost to stand up for the interests of the people of my own district because if I didn’t, who else would?”
Kelly said he thought long and hard about how the campaign changed him and finally realized, it hadn’t.
“I struggled for the correct words to accurately answer the question of how this election “changed” me,” Kelly wrote in an email. “When I found the answer, the words came easily. The answer is simple. I haven’t changed.”
Weaver easily retained his Cunningham supervisor seat with 1,231 votes which translated to almost 95 percent. However, 70 votes chose to write in a different candidate’s name. That means a little more than 5 percent of voters voted for someone else.
All three of the victorious school board members didn’t have much time to bask in their victory. The day after the election they were at a school board budget session preparing to work out a 2014 -2015 budget to present to the Board of Supervisors. None of the candidates who opposed them attended.
Claudia Thomas ran a write-in campaign against Washington. She received 134 votes, or 12 percent of the total votes in which 1,536 votes were cast. Washington received 980 votes or 88 percent of the votes.
William“Bill’ Hughes challenged Rittenhouse, trying to win the Cunningham school board seat he was appointed to in 2011, but lost to Rittenhouse in the 2012 election. In his bid, Hughes got 703 votes, or nearly 46 percent to Rittenhouse’s 820 votes and 53 percent. A total of 1,536 voters cast ballots in that race, 13 of them wrote in a name.
