MEDINA — Leslie Miller should have picked tails.

Miller got to call the coin toss Wednesday afternoon because her opponent, James Lovejoy, was in Colorado.

“I pick George Washington, the father of our country,” she said before Board of Elections Chairman Tom Wolfe threw the $1 coin into the air.

But when he took his hand away after it dropped on the table, the coin showed tails, making Lovejoy the winner of the second open seat on Seville Village Council.

“Last night when I was with my husband, we were flipping coins and when I called tails, it was heads,” Miller said.

The race came down to a coin toss after a hand recount of the votes Wednesday showed the two candidates were tied.

Miller and Lovejoy each received 291 votes in the Nov. 6 election, according to official totals released last week from the Medina County Board of Elections.

“It’s a shame it came down to a coin toss,” Lovejoy said in a phone interview from Colorado. “I would rather win by votes, but that’s the way it goes. I don’t feel like I won anything.”

This will be Lovejoy’s first term on council, while Miller has served for the last 12 years. Lovejoy currently serves on the village’s board of zoning appeals.

They ran for two open spots on village council along with S. Paul Hoskinson. Since Hoskinson received 323 votes, he had already won one of the seats…

Members of the board of elections and staff members counted the village’s votes by opening the canisters of the electronic voting machines used for the election and reading the paper trail receipt printed for each vote. Four two-person teams, which included one Republican and one Democrat, spent about an hour counting the votes before they were tabulated by board of elections director Sue Strasser.

“This is awful,” Miller said after arriving at the board of elections about halfway through the count.

At the time, Lovejoy was winning by one vote, but since the official total was a tie, staff members recounted the 17 absentee ballots cast from Seville residents.

“It’s very easy for the eye to make a mistake,” Strasser said, because the board members soon counted one more vote for Miller.

Wolfe, who is retiring this week as chairman of the board of elections after 35 years, said there has never been a coin toss to determine an election result since he’s been on the board.

Seville Mayor Conrad Sarnowski, who came to watch the recount, said he knew what Miller was going through since he only won his first term after a recount.

“Anyone who said their vote doesn’t count should witness something like this,” he said.