With all local votes in, Lapey tops Cardwell, Winstead wins board seat and Case clings to 2-vote lead over Kurtz

County board of elections to conduct manual recount; Monday deadline for overseas ballots could affect trustee race

By Greg Farrell • November 13, 2025

It took an extra week, but Jennifer Monachino Lapey appears to have won a sixth term as mayor of Pelham Manor, fending off a strong challenge from Mark Cardwell.

With all the local ballots counted by the Westchester County Board of Elections, Lapey topped her opponent Mark Cardwell by 20 votes, but her slim margin of victory will likely trigger an automatic recount.

In the race for the two openings on the Manor’s Board of Trustees, Deborah Winstead appears to have won a seat and incumbent Tim Case continues to lead Ryan Kurtz by two votes, which will also be subject to a recount. The other incumbent, DJ McLaughlin, finished fourth.

The county will accept any absentee or mail-in ballots that arrive from overseas until Monday, so the Case/Kurtz race is not yet over. Some 14 ballots that were sent to overseas addresses of voters registered in the Manor have not yet been returned, according to data from the county board.

The board will conduct a recanvass of voting machines throughout the county on Friday at its offices in Ardsley starting at 10 AM. The recanvassing is public and interested parties are encouraged to attend, according to a spokeswoman for the board. As for the recount, it will be close to Thanksgiving before it’s completed, she estimated.

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About the Contributor

Greg Farrell, Executive Director

Greg Farrell became executive director of the Pelham Examiner in June 2025, following the retirement of Rich Zahradnik, who cofounded the Examiner in 2018 alongside 24 Pelham students. Farrell began his journalism career more than 40 years ago at the Swampscott Reporter, a Massachusetts weekly. He reported on town meetings, profiled residents and covered controversial development projects. He subsequently served as a bureau chief at Adweek magazine, a white-collar crime reporter at USA Today, a Wall Street correspondent at the Financial Times and a senior reporter at Bloomberg News. He wrote “Crash of the Titans,” a book about the collapse of Merrill Lynch and its sale to Bank of America during the financial crisis of 2008. He taught high school earlier in his career and currently teaches CCD to middle schoolers at St. Catharine’s. He and his wife Cathy Taylor moved to Pelham in 2000 and raised two children here.

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