CHARLESTON, W.Va. — Members of the Kanawha County Commission will be under close scrutiny when they meet as a Board of Canvassers beginning at 7 a.m. Tuesday to check the results of the 2018 General Election with 1,739 additional ballots in the mix.
“Normally, it’s kind of a ho-hum, pro forma deal,” Commission President Kent Carper said. “(Tuesday) will not be ho-hum and pro forma.”
Tuesday’s meeting will be held at the Kanawha County Voter’s Registration Office.
In all, the uncounted ballots came from 19 precincts with tabulation issues, county officials said last week.
“In a case like this, you know how things work,” Carper said on Monday’s MetroNews “Talkline.” “Those who are ahead want to stop counting anything. Those that are behind, they want to count everything.”
According to MetroNews analysis, 763 of the uncounted ballots included the 8th Senatorial District. Richard Lindsay, a Democrat, topped incumbent Senator Ed Gaunch (R-Kanawha, 08) by 288 votes in last Tuesday’s unofficial results, but Lindsay defeated Gaunch by 1,045 in Kanawha County where 76 of the district’s 93 precincts are located. Gaunch had 757 more votes than Lindsday in 17 Putnam County precincts.
More than 350 of the ballots included the 36th House Delegate District where Amanda Estep-Burton, a Democrat, finished in a 3rd qualifying spot 27 votes ahead of Chris Pritt, a Republican.
Estep-Burton said Monday she’s going into Tuesday’s canvass with confidence but there’s not much she can do.
“Of course, I’m optimistic but it is nerve-wracking. I feel good. I just want to make sure every vote gets counted,” Estep-Burton said.
For the 17th Senatorial District, there are 976 uncounted ballots. Unofficial results indicated incumbent Senator Tom Takubo (R-Kanawha, 17) beat Terrell Ellis in that race by 1,525 votes.
For the Charleston mayoral race, the problem precincts included 339 ballots. Amy Goodwin, Charleston’s mayor-elect, finished that race nearly 1,000 votes ahead of J.B. Akers, the Republican candidate.
The issues first came to light late last week.
Kanawha County Clerk Vera McCormick previously 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.
Carper said he would not speculate about the circumstances that created the problems.
“What I intend to do is take our time in a transparent manner in front of everybody, lay out all the materials on the table and I probably will suggest that we start with the one precinct with the largest number and see if we can figure out what happened there,” he said.
“Then we’ll go to the other ones.”
In addition to the uncounted ballots, more than 500 challenged ballots will have to be reviewed during the canvass.
“My concern is to see to it that everyone who voted, if their vote was a legal vote, that it was counted,” Carper said.
Similar canvasses to certify the results of the 2018 General Election will be undertaken in the coming days across West Virginia.
Jeff Jenkins contributed to this story.