CHARLESTON, W.Va. — Kanawha County officials have raised questions about 1,700 ballots, potentially affecting election outcomes.
What happened didn’t appear to be immediately clear even to the Kanawha County officials who were discussing the problem.
“There are a lot of candidates out there wondering if this is going to affect their race or where the votes were located,” said Kanawha County Commissioner Ben Salango.
The questions are most likely to affect two legislative races.
On Election Night, Democratic challenger Richard Lindsay was believed to have defeated Republican incumbent Ed Gaunch by 288 votes for state Senate.
Another close contest was the 36th Delegate District, where Democrat Amanda Estep Burton was third out of three seats, appearing to finish 27 votes ahead of Republican Chris Pritt.
The ballot questions were announced during a Friday afternoon press conference at Kanawha County Voter Registration. Several lawyers representing candidates and parties were present.
Lindsay was at the press conference but declined comment. Gaunch was not there.
Ballot questions in Kanawha County#WV https://t.co/9NRkVGcU7z
— Brad McElhinny (@BradMcElhinny) November 9, 2018
The number in question is believed to be 1,739 ballots across 19 precincts. Right now, officials don’t believe other precincts were affected.
“The size of it surprised me,” Kanawha County Commission President Kent Carper said. “I don’t understand. And I don’t understand exactly how this could happen. We don’t know. I’m not a bit ashamed to say we don’t know.”
— Brad McElhinny (@BradMcElhinny) November 9, 2018
Nothing will be resolved until 7 a.m. Tuesday, when regularly-scheduled vote canvassing takes place. Kanawha officials said there are also more than 500 provisional ballots to review.
Until then, county officials emphasized, ballots are behind a locked door. Canvassing usually takes hours and hours, well into the evening.
The West Virginia Secretary of State’s Office said it was aware of the questions.
“The WVSOS Office was notified by Kanawha Co. Clerk’s Office about discrepancies in unofficial ballots cast totals,” the Secretary of State said on Twitter.
“We discussed the issue and plan to assist the Clerk with the election system vendor for a thorough review. Foul play is not apparent at this time.”
Kanawha officials said such widespread problems are unprecedented.
“I have no idea what happened here. I can surmise, I can guess, I can speculate,” said Kanawha County Commission President Kent Carper.
“I don’t know if it was just an error here during the counting process on Election Night. I’m surmising, I don’t know that.”
Kanawha County got new electronic voting machines this year. Some problems arose during testing where a few machines overheated and wouldn’t take ballots properly.
Kanawha County Clerk Vera McCormick speculated one problem might have occurred as ballots were meant to be fed through machines at the end of each person’s voting process.
“Sometimes when they take the stubs off, they said it doesn’t read good, and they’ll spit it back and then they’ll put it in the emergency bin,” McCormick said.
“It could be that it went down. That’s a typical Election Day. You might have a problem with a machine. But we had maintenance people all day if there was a problem, checking things out. It could have been anything. Power could have gone out.”
So ballots that didn’t feed properly into machines at the end of people’s voting process were supposed to be placed in emergency bins. Those were then kept under lock with other ballots at Kanawha Voter Registration.
“We don’t know that until we get in there to look,” McCormick said.
McCormick said problems became apparent when statements from poll workers were checked against ballot stubs.
“We just verified the numbers to see if it matched up, and if it didn’t we knew there was a problem,” she said.
Salango said he became aware of potential problems with one precinct Friday morning. From then, the problem kept snowballing with every update.
“I inquired a little further and found out there were four precincts that had tabulation issues. And when I arrived today, I found out there were 19 precincts with tabulation issues,” Salango said just after 2 p.m.
But he said the problems first became apparent Friday evening.
McCormick defended herself while seated at a folding table with Salango and the other commissioners. She said she’d tried to be as open as possible about the concerns in recent hours.
“I was not trying to cover anything up,” she said. “I never have and never will. As soon as I knew something, you all would know. I’m sorry if think I wasn’t going to let you in on it. That’s not true.
“I wouldn’t do you that way, and I wouldn’t expect you all to do me that way.”
Carper publicly backed McCormick.
“I have complete confidence in the integrity of this office. Period,” Carper said.
But, Carper added, “I would have preferred to have known about this yesterday.”