Votes checked with high-speed scanner

A rescan of all the ballots caused by a programming error on election night was conducted Thursday morning at the Carbon County Election Bureau in Jim Thorpe.

Dominion Voting Systems provided a high-speed scanner to do the rescan to verify that the system was functioning as it is intended and the counts released the day after the election were in fact correct.

Lisa Dart, director of elections, provided an update on Friday morning.

“We are in the process of canvassing,” Dart said. “We are still hand counting ballots, and in tandem, we are using a high-speed scanner, which does two things: It will place each image into our system so we can adjudicate any write-ins or ambiguous marks, and it is counting the ballots that were cast on election night on each individual precinct scanner (checks and balances).”

Dart said they have hand-counted about 16 precincts, as well as scanned precincts 4-16 (Banks Township through Jim Thorpe Borough 3rd Ward). There is a total of 51 precincts.

Totals change

“There has been no significant changes in the totals that we found doing a recheck last Friday from the totals that were recorded using the precinct scanner result tapes from election night,” she said.

• Lehighton Borough Ward 1: Clerk of Courts had zeros, Fran (Heaney) to 178 votes, Tyra (Boni) to 163 votes, 2 write in, 15 under vote.

• Penn Forest Township Middle: Commissioner — Chris (Lukasevich)12 votes to 124.

Commissioner William O’Gurek, who chairs the Carbon County Election Board, said that as of Thursday’s commissioners’ meeting, the county had completed the hand count through about 11 districts, but the staff had turned its direction to the high speed scanner Thursday and would resume the hand count after the scan was completed.

“We can use the results of (the high speed scanner) as a barometer to compare to the statistics that we released on Wednesday morning of last week,” O’Gurek said.

On Monday, the Carbon County Election Board will reconvene its board meeting at 1 p.m. on Monday to discuss the status of where the election bureau is in the hand count and what the findings are up until that point.

Results from the high-speed scan should be ready at that time, county solicitor Dan Miscavige said.

He said the election board decided on the scan to make sure the votes the members certify are accurate and correct and that voters and candidates know everything was done properly.

Hearing scheduled

In addition, there will be a hearing before Carbon County President Judge Roger Nanovic at 9 a.m. on Wednesday on the Republican Party’s petition to stop the hand count.

O’Gurek said as part of the court order Nanovic signed on Nov. 12 regarding the hearing, the petitioners — Lee Becker, Wallace Putkowski and Katie Kokinda — are required to give notice of the petition and hearing date to all candidates.

O’Gurek said an estimated 165 candidates need to be served.

Last Friday, the Carbon County Election Board met, and after much discussion and questions from candidates about if the vote counts were accurate, the board voted unanimously to complete both a complete hand count audit of the paper ballots and ask Dominion Voting Systems to bring in a high-speed scanner to do a rescan of all the ballots to verify that the system was functioning as it is intended and the counts released the day after the election were correct.

According to the election law, the hand count audit must be done by county employees under the jurisdiction of the commissioners’ office and cannot be completed by a third, independent party.

On election night, a programming error caused the vote tallying system to not count votes for municipalities and school districts after Lower Towamensing Township.

The problem arose before the election, when it was discovered that two candidates — one in Lower Towamensing Township and one in Mahoning Township — had to be added to the ballots and voting system database after they had been overlooked.

Both candidates were nominated to fill the vacancies of candidates who had died.

During the vote tallying, the election bureau realized the tabulations were not correct and officials worked through the night, recording the vote tallies from the tapes each precinct’s scanner printed and entering them into the system. A new report with final vote counts was released Wednesday.

Becker, chairman of the Carbon County Republican Committee, Putkowski and Kokinda on Tuesday morning filed a complaint against the election board and asked for an immediate halt to the hand count, which began Saturday, because, they say, the action was not allowable as part of the canvassing to certify the vote.

Amy Miller contributed to this report.