Tuesday will be the first day in nearly two years that Mayor Rob Ford will not have to worry that he might be evicted from office by a judge.

The city’s compliance audit committee voted 2-1 on Monday against hiring a special prosecutor to pursue non-criminal charges against Ford for alleged election finance violations. Ford, whose mayoralty has been plagued by legal distractions, has now won both of the cases that threatened his political future.

An auditor concluded that Ford’s 2010 mayoral campaign committed numerous “apparent contraventions” of the Municipal Elections Act. But his lawyer, Tom Barlow, told the committee the breaches were insignificant and unintentional — and that, through the audit and the accompanying media scrutiny, Ford has learned his lesson and “answered for his conduct.”

The three committee members did not explain their votes. Ford said he is “happy the process is finally over.”

“It’s a great day for democracy,” he said in a prepared statement he delivered in his City Hall office. “I’m happy the committee understands we ran a clean, professional, above-board campaign. We made every effort to comply with all the rules.”

The committee’s decision was a second major defeat in a month for Adam Chaleff-Freudenthaler and Max Reed, the two citizens who filed the audit case and who quietly initiated the conflict of interest case Ford won on appeal in January.

Chaleff-Freudenthaler did not rule out the possibility that they will bring a rare private prosecution against Ford. In Hamilton, a citizen laid 18 charges in 2005 against companies she believed had made excessive donations to a 2003 mayoral campaign. She obtained one guilty plea and 16 admissions of responsibility.

“We’re considering our options. All of them,” Chaleff-Freudenthaler, a left-leaning activist and former vice-chair of the library board, said in an interview.

The committee settled Ford’s fate in dramatic fashion. John Hollins, the former elections chief for the city and the province, tabled a motion to prosecute Ford. But Virginia MacLean, an Oakville-based lawyer, quietly said that she did not agree. After a pause, chair Douglas Colbourne, former chair of the Ontario Municipal Board, said he too would not support Hollins’s proposal.

Ford was stoic during the meeting and did not react visibly to the vote. He refused to take questions from reporters after his statement.

Barlow offered explanations for most of Ford’s alleged transgressions. But he focused on his argument that a prosecution would not serve “the public interest” even if the committee accepted all of the auditor’s findings.

Even if Ford were convicted, Barlow said, he would receive a fine at most — and Ford, he said, was a first-time candidate for mayor who did his best to abide by the law.

“There is no such thing as perfection in life, and there certainly is no such thing as perfection in election law. And there is also, generally speaking, no such thing as perfection in accounting,” Barlow said.

The audit found that Ford appeared to break the law by exceeding the $1.3 million spending limit by $40,168, or about 3 per cent, largely because of events the auditor believed he misclassified as fundraisers exempt from the limit. Barlow argued that the events were indeed fundraisers.

The audit also found that the campaign had accepted an improper $77,722 no-interest loan from a family company, Doug Ford Holdings, and received improper preferential credit terms from another family company, Deco Labels and Tags.

Candidates are only permitted to take loans from banks or other “recognized” lenders. Barlow told the committee that Ford believed money from Doug Ford Holdings was his own money, even though the company is a corporation in which he is one of four family shareholders.

In addition, the audit found that Ford had accepted 11 prohibited corporate donations among more than 2,000 properly accepted individual donations; accepted 21 prohibited cash donations for amounts larger than $25; incurred $5,805 in expenses before Ford registered to run; failed to correctly report post-election fundraisers; and improperly identified four promotional events as fundraising events exempt from the $1.3 million spending limit.

Councillor Doug Ford again accused Reed and Chaleff-Freudenthaler of pursuing a political vendetta against the mayor. But he also joined them in calling for legal reform.

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Chaleff-Freudenthaler said the city should have an independent audit official who reviews candidates’ financial statements and determines whether an audit should be sought; at present, citizens must request audits themselves. Doug Ford called for mandatory independent audits of every candidate.

Rob Ford won a defamation lawsuit in December and the conflict of interest case in January. The man who sued him for defamation has appealed, and the lawyer who tried the conflict case may launch a longshot appeal to the Supreme Court.

Chaleff-Freudenthaler said he did not regret his decision to bring the audit and conflict cases. “I think that in all cases, whether I’ve been involved or not been involved, where we go through these processes, the public gets a much greater understanding of the laws that protect our democracy. And politicians do as well,” he said.