ANADARKO, Okla. – A challenge to the Caddo Nation’s special election has been denied.

The Caddo Nation Election Board voted 4-0 with one abstention on Jan. 21 to reject a challenge from former tribal chairwoman Brenda Shemayme Edwards to the tribe’s Jan. 10 election. Edwards finished 11 votes behind the unofficial winner, Tamara Francis, and had filed a challenge to the results, claiming that more than 30 Caddo voters were either denied the right to cast a ballot at a polling place or never received an absentee ballot despite submitting a request by the deadline.

Edwards’ pleading included affidavits from 11 would-be Caddo voters. Among them were several from absentee voters who received their ballots less than 48 hours before the return deadline.

In the election board’s decision to deny Edwards’ challenge, they noted that even though several absentee voters received their ballots close to the response deadline, they still had sufficient time to mail them back. The board also noted that the tribe’s election code does not have any language about provisional ballots and that it explicitly states that absentee ballots must be submitted by mail rather than hand-delivered to a polling place.

The lone abstention in the election board’s vote came from Jason Glidewell, an Anadarko-based attorney who was appointed by a court order to oversee the election. Prior to the election, Glidewell was a court-appointed special master over the tribe’s finances as it attempted to sort out a protracted leadership schism. That split prompted a judge with the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ Southern Plains Court of Indian Offenses to call for the election and declare all of the tribe’s elected offices vacant in October.