Fairview's Mayor's Race Came Down to 35 Votes. Here's How Close Past Races Have Been
Rick Shepherd won Fairview's mayor's race by 35 votes on the unofficial count, the narrowest of the races The Fairviewian has totals for. Here is how close the city's elections have been since 2010.
In November 2022, Lisa Anderson became Fairview's mayor by 120 votes. In the same election, the last seat on the Board of Commissioners was decided by 19.
Margins that small are possible in a city where a few thousand people vote in each race. Here is what the county's results and local news coverage show about how close Fairview's elections have been, and what happened on Nov. 3, 2026.
Winning margins in five Fairview city races before Nov. 3, 2026. The 2010, 2012 and 2022 counts are unofficial; the 2024 count is certified.The Fairviewian | Source: Williamson County Election Commission; Williamson Herald
This year's results
On Nov. 3, 2026, the mayor's race was closer still. Rick Shepherd received 1,420 votes, Vice Mayor Chris McDonald 1,385 and Mayor Lisa Anderson 1,192, according to the Williamson County Election Commission's unofficial report of all 27 vote centers (see our election results page). Shepherd won by 35 votes. In the commission race, where voters picked two, David Bynum had 2,223 and Scott Lucas 1,588. Commissioner Wayne Hall finished third with 1,533, 55 votes short of the second seat, and Karen Cobb had 1,441. The numbers are unofficial until the county certifies them, which it must do by Nov. 23. Shepherd's 35-vote margin is the narrowest of the Fairview mayor's races The Fairviewian has found vote totals for.
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Three candidates ran for mayor in 2022. Lisa Anderson received 1,281 votes, Rod Dawson 1,161 and Debby Rainey 373, according to the unofficial results the Williamson County Election Commission posted the morning after the Nov. 8, 2022 election. Write-ins added 17 votes.
That left Anderson ahead of Dawson by 120 votes out of 2,832 cast for a candidate. In other words, a shift of 61 voters would have changed the result.
The county's unofficial 2022 count: Anderson led Dawson by 120 votes, and Hall finished 19 votes ahead of McDonald for the second commission seat.Source: Williamson County Election Commission, Unofficial Election Results, State and Federal General Election, Nov. 8, 2022 | Fairview Research Archive
The commission race was closer. Voters could pick two of three candidates. Leslie Fischer-Street led with 1,592 votes. Wayne Hall took the second seat with 1,476. Chris McDonald finished third with 1,457, 19 votes short.
McDonald didn't stay off the board for long. After Fischer-Street resigned in August 2023, the board voted 3-0 on Sept. 21, 2023 to ask the county to schedule a special election for the vacant seat, the minutes show. That election was held Jan. 11, 2024, and it was close, too. McDonald received 186 votes and Jeffrey Pape 167, out of 353 ballots cast, according to the Election Commission's minutes of Jan. 25, 2024, when it certified the result. That is another 19-vote margin. McDonald was sworn in as a commissioner before the Feb. 1, 2024 meeting, according to the city's minutes. He became vice mayor after the 2024 election.
The 2022 figures are the county's unofficial count. The Election Commission's online results archive lists only unofficial results for the November 2022 election, and its posted minutes begin in 2024. The Fairviewian has not seen the certified 2022 totals.
2010 and 2012: two more close calls
Close races aren't new.
In the November 2010 mayor's race, Beverly Totty beat Stuart Johnson 1,114 to 1,004, a 110-vote margin, by the unofficial count reported by the Williamson Herald on Nov. 4, 2010. Johnson, then a sitting commissioner, stayed on the board.
Two years later, three commission seats were on the ballot. All three incumbents kept them, the Williamson Herald reported on Nov. 7, 2012: Johnson with 1,706 votes, Toney Sutton with 1,703 and Allen Bissell with 1,507. Challenger Millicent Kidder had 1,387, which left her 120 votes short of the third seat. Johnson and Sutton finished three votes apart, though both won.
Not every race has been close. In 2014, Patti Carroll won the open mayor's seat with 67% of the vote, according to a Tennessean.com report from Nov. 5, 2014. In 2018, John W. Blade won with 1,781 votes to Mike Anderson's 875 and Antwuane Scruggs's 293, a 906-vote margin, by the unofficial count the Williamson Herald reported on Nov. 6, 2018.
2024: a wider gap
The 2024 commission race, with two seats and four candidates, was not close. Don Bufalini led with 2,805 votes and Carolyn Roberts won the second seat with 2,413, according to the Election Commission's certified results. Jeffrey Pape had 1,741 and Stuart Johnson, by then an appointed commissioner, had 1,653. Roberts's margin over Pape was 672 votes.
The certified 2024 commission results. Each voter could pick two candidates, so the 8,612 total counts votes, not voters.Source: Williamson County Election Commission, Certification of Election Results, City of Fairview Municipal Election, Nov. 5, 2024 | Fairview Research Archive
More people voted in the 2024 city race than in 2022. It was on the same ballot as the presidential election, and each voter could pick two candidates, so 8,612 votes were cast in all.
The most recent city race before Nov. 3 was for municipal court clerk, on the Aug. 6, 2026 county ballot. Gina Mangrum Cox received 1,289 votes to Debra Bufalini's 558, according to the unofficial results.
What these numbers don't show
The Fairviewian is not reporting turnout percentages. Turnout is the share of registered voters who cast a ballot. The county results kept in our archive for these Fairview races don't include a city registered-voter count, and a percentage without that count would be a guess.
Results for some years are missing. The Fairviewian found vote totals for Fairview's 2010, 2012, 2018, 2022 and 2024 city races, plus the 2014 vote share. We did not find totals for the 2006, 2016 or 2020 elections in the records we searched. Fairview's first direct election for mayor was in 2006, after voters approved an elected mayor by referendum, the minutes of May 18, 2006 show. Before that, the board picked the mayor from among its members.
The 2010, 2012, 2014 and 2018 numbers come from newspaper reports of the unofficial count. Certified totals can differ slightly.
The takeaway
Of the four earlier Fairview mayor's races for which The Fairviewian found results (2010, 2014, 2018 and 2022), two were decided by 120 votes or fewer. In 2022 a commission seat was settled by 19 votes. In 2026, the mayor's race came down to 35.
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