Tuesday is the big day. Florida will choose its governor with the seeming inevitability of a razor thin margin that could come down to recounts and dueling attorneys, but we could see similar drama on the local front as well.

By Tuesday night, we should find out who won the very interesting Manatee County Commission District 6 Race. I say “should,” allowing for the possibility that it would be too close to call that evening. The same goes for the Manatee School Board District 5 run-off.

It's difficult and expensive to try and get accurate polling on a county-level race, so they are always interesting and sometimes impossible to predict. That being said, I get the sense that both will be close, which means we could have a situation where recounts are required, and disputed or provisional ballots become a factor.

If such is the case, the Manatee County Supervisor of Elections Office will be under a microscope. When races include a sizable margin of victory, such matters are rarely of consequence, but when they come down to the wire, they can decide a race and hence, the direction of a board and the entire community it governs.

The SOE has already come under fire for the overlap of around 7,000 voters who requested absentee ballots before the deadline but after the SOE's office ordered sample ballots, which read "Important: Voters receiving this sample ballot are no longer registered for Vote By Mail (Absentee). Call today to update registration 941-741-3823."

Teri Wonder, the Democratic candidate for the district 6 county commission race, has been working with her team to contact voters who participated in early voting and had their ballots set aside, mostly for inconsistent signatures. Wonder has complained that although such voters are supposed to be contacted by the SOE in order to give them an opportunity to rectify their vote, many that she and her team had contacted said they had not gotten a call.

Wonder said that she ran into a fair degree of disenfranchisement and two of the voters from the referred ballot list said they were handicapped and didn't know whether they would be able to get to the SOE's office before the election. One was in advanced stages of ALS (possibly why the signature didn't look right).

Like I said, if the election is elementary, it will be a non-issue. If it is close, clouds will loom. Manatee County Supervisor of Elections Mike Bennett assured TBT's John Rehill that “every valid vote will be counted,” and therein lies the rub.

Rehill said that Bennett also sneaked in a jab at Wonder, saying that the Democrat “would understand these things better if she had voted more often,” an apparent reference to her opponent's debunked attack on her voting record.

Bennett, long one of the most powerful Republicans in the state, is a highly political individual who brings much baggage to the supposedly non-partisan SOE post. Aside from having long been one of the top Republican PAC operatives in Florida, for years using his expertise to help special interests influence local political races, he's also expressed some pretty colorful ideas on voting.

During debate over the passage of Florida's new voter ID and early voting laws, Bennett was serving in the Florida Senate and said, "I don't have a problem making it harder (to vote). I want the people in the state of Florida to want to vote as badly as that person in Africa who is willing to walk 200 miles for that opportunity he’s never had before in his life. This should not be easy.”

Democrats might be a bit paranoid over the sample ballots (more of which went out to Republicans who'd requested absentee ballots than to Dems) and the referred list, or they might be expressing some very healthy skepticism. Time will tell.

Whether the county commission race is close or not is something else I'm very curious to see. As I said before, I didn't give Wonder the proverbial snowball's chance through the first 10 months or so of her campaign. Conventional wisdom said that if a Democrat was going to win a BOCC seat besides District 2 in Manatee County, it would have to be one that wasn't countywide.

Running a countywide race simply presents a lot of ground to cover. That usually translates to money, which Democratic candidates have not been very successful in raising in Manatee County unless they were named Gwen Brown and had been anointed by Republican developer Pat Neal (Brown held the Dem-heavy District 2 for 16 years, mostly through developers supporting her campaigns). In any countywide race, whoever the special interests line-up behind will have close to a hundred grand, which is a tremendous amount of leverage in a race that size.

When you consider that the county is almost 2-1 Republican to Democrat in the make-up of its registered voters, that makes it an even tougher battle. Overcoming those odds via shoe-leather campaigning in a small district with its unique issues seems much more manageable than throughout a sprawling county of more than 200,000 voters.

All that being said, Wonder has done everything she possibly could have to win the race – and she's had help from Whitmore. Knowing she had to cover much ground, Wonder began her campaign over a year ago and has been pounding the pavement ever since. Her opponent has out-fundraised her about $5-1, but Wonder still managed to raise more than $22,000, which is much more than anyone (myself included) thought she could.

Whitmore raised over a hundred grand and had she simply kept quiet, put up a lot of signs and sent out positive direct mail and robo-calls that never even acknowledged her opponent, I think she would have cruised to an 8-10 point victory on the strength of straight-ticket voters alone.

Instead, she went into attack mode and engaged her opponent anytime she could. The result was an opportunity for voters to hear from a highly intelligent PhD candidate – Wonder – whose interesting story, unique experiences and sensible platform most have found very appealing.

Whitmore has existed almost solely on the defense, too often evading issues and citing legal concerns over discussing things that could potentially become part of lawsuits. When she's gone after Wonder, she's routinely been proven inaccurate, which left her looking dishonest, while giving voters a better look at her opponent's upside.

If Terri Wonder wins, one of the first people she should thank is Carol Whitmore. If remains the operative word. Wonder has raised enough money to at least supplement her grassroots, door-to-door campaign adequately. She's spent more than a year campaigning heavily all throughout the county. She's proven herself a strong candidate who does well on the stump as well as in debates. She's showed up at everything and engaged voters. Her platform is appealing to most residents in terms of what they say is important to them.

Wonder also has a vulnerable opponent, who while well-funded, has issues like the No-Kill scandal, supporting the $23 million indigent care tax and its $300,000 special election, the Long Bar Pointe development, and the deep well injection site at Piney Point working against her. If Wonder can't overcome the "R" next to Whitmore's name and the hundred grand in her campaign account, that is a bad sign for Democrats, as well as Independents and Republicans who are disappointed with the status quo in Manatee County.

That being said, there are 55,000 registered independents in Manatee County (our fastest growing voter demographic). I've also talked to a surprising number of Republicans who are supporting Wonder. They've even formed the group Republicans for Terri Wonder. The last two years have brought unprecedented citizen involvement in county politics, most of it expressing great frustration with the status quo that Whitmore has supported. If there ever was a year …

In the school board race, the outcome will be interesting as well. Mary Cantrell finished only two points behind Julie Aranibar in the three-way non-partisan race on the August primary ballot. Turnout will be much higher and there were around 7,000 voters that voted for James Golden, who will now pick between the two runoff candidates.

The incumbent, Julie Aranibar, has about $22,000 more dollars left to spend than her opponent, though both have crossed that $30,000 threshold that it seems to take to run an effective school board race. This one is too close to call I'd say, though Aranibar's record as a reformer on a board that was headed toward disaster when she got elected and started asking the tough questions in 2010, should have built her enough credibility to pull it out.

Again, each time you hear the two candidates speak, Aranibar seems to clearly be the stronger candidate with the better articulated platform and the stronger command of district financial issues (undoubtedly the most important aspect of this election). Alas, elections are too often decided by voters who have not heard either candidate speak, or even know much about the issues at stake, so it's hard to tell.

It's non-partisan, so there will be no straight-ticket effect (especially as both candidates are known to be Republicans), but the degree of misinformation that surrounds school district politics gives me a sense that anything can happen. Again, hopefully we'll know by Tuesday night.

If you haven't voted absentee or through early voting, get out to your precinct on Tuesday and have your say. If you've voted absentee, check to make sure your vote was counted and if you show up on Tuesday and are made to fill out a provisional ballot – follow up. Check out TBT's election coverage and our endorsement page to get more information, but get out there and participate because by Wednesday morning, it will be all said and done … maybe.

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Vote, Even if You Have to Hold Your Nose

Dennis Maley's column appears every Thursday and Sunday in The Bradenton Times. He can be reached at dennis.maley@thebradentontimes.com. Click here to visit his column archive. Click here to go to his bio page. You can also follow Dennis on Facebook.