The Birmingham City Council met again on Friday to elect a president after an error in voting on Tuesday nullified what had been announced as the election of Darrell O’Quinn.

O’Quinn was elected Friday morning in the special called meeting, this time with five votes to three for previous council president Wardine Alexander, with council member Crystal Smitherman abstaining. Alexander was elected Tuesday as president pro tem and will continue in that role.

Before the vote took place on Friday, Council member Clinton Woods called for an investigation into “potential malfeasance,” asking how an invalid election took place on Tuesday, with O’Quinn being declared the winner with only four votes cast with three candidates running.

“It’s imperative we determine what went wrong,” Woods said, as O’Quinn “illegally assumed the office” due to an “illegal vote” on Tuesday.

“A mistake occurred – a mathematical error,” said city attorney Nicole King.

“It’s done now, and it’s time for us to move on and get back on track,” O’Quinn said after the meeting.

“My understanding is that I think the clerk just simply made a mistake,” O’Quinn said. “It’s understandable because (City Clerk) Lee Frazier is an expert on Robert’s Rules of Order and parliamentary procedure, and if you were strictly using parliamentary procedure as your guideline for making a determination on the election, I think you would have come to the conclusion that he did. However, the Mayor-Council Act has a different rule, so because the two aren’t exactly in alignment I think there was opportunity for that confusion.”

He added, “I do want transparency; I don’t think that there’s more to it … even if there were an investigation, that’s the likely outcome of any investigation, was that it was just a simple error based on two different sets of rules.”

Woods did not get unanimous consent to initiate an immediate investigation but said he will bring it back to the council as a formal resolution.

“I heard some very concerning things about what led to that,” Woods said after the meeting, although he did not specify what he meant. “Prayerfully, none of those things are true, but I think it’s important as a council with all the feedback from the community wanting to understand what’s going on, that we investigate.”