A malfunctioning scanner used to tally mail-in absentee ballots caused the results of the two contested races in Bryan County not to be known until well after midnight Tuesday.
With both the race for the District 4 BOE seat and District 1 seat on the Board of Commissioners close enough that the number of write-in ballots could have been enough to sway either election, the mail-in ballots had to be scanned three times before they could be accurately counted.
“We had a problem with a scanner that we use to scan mail-in absentee ballots. We ran them through, took to the scanner to the computer but they would not upload. So we had to go back and redo them with the same scanner but they still would not up load. It would scan them fine but when we went to upload them, it wouldn’t work. We had 613 absentee ballots, it takes about an hour and a half or so to run those things through,” Davis said.
Eventually Davis had to have a second scanner programmed to process the ballots but by then the final count had been delayed by at least four hours.
“We would have been through by 9:30 if it wasn’t for that,” Davis said. “As it was I got out of here about 2 a.m.”
Before the mail-in vote count Marianne Smith led Jeff Morton in the school board race with 51 percent of the vote to Morton’s 49 percent.
In the three-way race for the county commission seat Noah Covington, with 49 percent of the votes cast, was close to having the 50 percent plus one vote needed to win the contest outright.
In the end the mail-in votes did not alter either election. Smith maintained her 51-49 percent margin; while Covington finished the night with 48 percent of the vote and will face incumbent Joe Kendrick, who finished with 28 percent, in a Dec. 4 runoff. The third candidate in the race, former commissioner Rufus “Ed” Bacon, received 24 percent of the votes and did not qualify of the runoff.
Meanwhile even with the late night, the work of the elections staff has not ended.
“Unfortunately our work doesn’t end the day after the election. We can’t certify the election until Friday,” Davis said.
The election results can not be certified for three days for two reasons.
First, if on Election Day someone comes in to vote who is not on the list of registered voters they are given a provisional ballot and allowed three days to prove they live in the voting district. Secondly, military absentee voters are allowed three addition days to have their ballots delivered by mail.
Regardless, Davis said there won’t be enough provisional or military ballots to alter the outcome.
“We have less than 15 provisional ballots and we usually get one or two military ballots but it won’t be enough to change the results,” Davis said.
Additionally preparations must be made for the Dec. 4 runoff between Kendrick and Covington, including arrangements for advanced voting.
“The law says we have to set it (advanced voting) up as quickly as possible, but we have to get the database built and the ballots printed. I don’t know exactly when it will start. We will start building the database today and if nothing goes wrong hopefully we’ll be able to start soon. Our goal is to have it during the last two weeks in November,” Davis said.