Carbon faces major decision after glitch in election results
A ballot lies on top of the new voting scanner that Carbon County voters will use on Tuesday. AMY MILLER/TIMES NEWS
Carbon County election officials have much to discuss when the board meets Friday.
At the beginning of the weekly board of commissioners meeting Thursday, commissioner candidate Robert Jacobs raised concerns over the dissemination of inaccurate results to the media, candidates and public only to then report an additional 10,000 votes for county offices come Wednesday morning.
After the polls closed Tuesday night, the election report contained obvious errors in municipal and school board races. In some races, votes were only listed for the first candidate on the ballot. In other cases, candidates had a small number of votes.
An error in listing a candidate in two municipal races was determined to be the factor that caused the glitch in the vote tallying.
Commissioner William O’Gurek, who chairs the county election board, discussed in detail an executive session held just before the commissioners meeting. In attendance were O’Gurek, elections director Lisa Dart, representatives from Dominion Voting and the department of state and county solicitor.
They discussed what the county needs to do to make sure every vote is properly counted in this election and verify this will not happen again in future elections.
He said the election board members were given five options to discuss and decide upon on Friday as it begins the official canvassing to certify the votes.
Options include bringing in a high speed scanner to rescan all ballots, manually entering the data from the tapes the scanners printed out from each precinct and a complete hand count audit, meaning every ballot would be looked at and counted by a person.
Jacobs, who did not secure a spot on board next year, suggested a complete independent audit to make sure everything is done. Commissioner-elect Chris Lukasevich, who secured his first term on Tuesday, agreed.
The county said that it will be left to the election board to decide what will happen moving forward.
“I want to get this right,” O’Gurek said. “It’s important to get this right.”
Comments
Test it for future elections later.
Write in ballots were removed from machines and openly placed on the table. The full verification would require the signature pages to ballot counts are equal.
Sincerely,
Citizen David F. Bradley Sr.
Now that there is a potential recount, won't the privacy of voters be violated given the ballot and sign book correlations?
Sincerely,
Citizen David F. Bradley Sr.
I usually stick up for you in personal discussions, but I will say you are no champion for privacy when you're requesting emails and documents that could contain personal information. I do understand your cause tho...a majority of those people you sit with are all corrupt.
Privacy, security and redundancy were in question.
Canvassing (checking of ballots) will be done on 100% of the ballots, with a hand counts and a high-speed rescan of all the ballots. Bravo to the Carbon Election Board for doing the right thing in getting accurate counts.
Legally, this should have already started today, Friday morning, at 9 am. However, the County is in a bit of an uproar over the massive amount of errors. A packed house filled the Election Office this morning. The errors that were shared would best be called by the computer generation as a bug, or programming error. However, the older fellows called it a glitch, as if it was an anomoly, or unpredicted mechanical failure of a single voting machine. This failure appears to be systemic.
The standard checks and balances in the system were apparently missed with the vendor of the machines taking the role as leader. The public officials admitted to having little to no knowledge of the programming process, or verification of said software programs, proving their blind trust to the vendor.
Restored trust in election results should follow the 100% manual and re-scan process. At the end of this ballot review, the ability to hold a smooth election should be restored.
It is very obvious, these errors were merely a function of actions that were taken, and not taken in opposition to common accepted practices. The process to ensure privacy, security and redundancy appear to have failed on this first run with the new machines.
Sincerely,
Citizen David F. Bradley Sr
I’ll let you know, we at our station, took security of the ballots with upmost urgency, which I see you chose not to mention that, so be it.
I won’t say there aren’t problems to work out, but if you want to be taken seriously at least give us the courtesy of telling us your damn name before you ramble off questions ....