CHARLESTON, W.Va.— A week after election night, vote canvass is expected to start Tuesday in Kanawha County.
Kanawha County Commission President Lance Wheeler was on 580 Live with Dave Allen Monday morning, and he said they will hand-count some votes, and they’ll take a look at the provisional votes as well.
“Essentially what that means, we’re going to recount three percent as an audit, so that’s going to be about six precincts that we’ll randomly choose and we’ll recount every one of them, it’s going to take maybe all day, maybe into Wednesday,” Wheeler said. “And then we’re also going to look at provisional, those are just ballots that are challenged or maybe you’re not registered to vote but you thought you were, and you go to vote but you’re not on the list.”
Vote canvass is to help with the finalization of the results from early voting and election day votes.
The vote canvass in Kanawha County comes after the county had to recount their early votes because a corrupted data stick was found in one of the tabulation machines after the polls closed on election night.
After the data stick was found, Wheeler said that the commission wanted to make sure that they explained what was happening because it delayed the results until the next morning.
“We were very transparent, we immediately issued a statement, saying that there was an issue, we explained the issue to the candidates,” Wheeler said.
And while people have complained that there not using paper ballots, Wheeler says that’s not the case because all the machine does is let the person chose who they are voting for and a machine to count the vote when there done.
“So when that ballot goes through that machine, before you leave, and they show you that it’s counted, it tabulates what you voted and it puts it onto a data stick, it’s kind of a USB but it doesn’t work for any other device, other than the tabulator machine for voting and so that stick, holds every time, a ballot run through that it holds every one of those votes where they were cast,” Wheeler said.
What led to them having to recount all of the early votes was because they didn’t know where those 1700 ballots were, because they had a bunch of people coming to that one early voting place.
“We didn’t know where those ballots are, we have the paper ballots, we had them all stored and locked away as the state code says, but we didn’t know which ones weren’t counted,” Wheeler said. “And so unfortunately the only way that we could determine the integrity of the election and making sure that every vote that was cast is counted, is we had to count all 31,454 early votes on election night.”
He said despite the mishap with the data stick, the process of recounting those early votes worked, everything checked out.
“The checks and balances of it work, yes, the process worked,” Wheeler said. “We counted all of those until 8 a.m., and when those numbers came, we were crossing our fingers, when those numbers came back, they balanced, what that means the numbers, the numbers of votes that we knew that were cast in early vote were counted in the machine.”