About 7,000 ballots left to be counted in Sedgwick County
About 7,000 votes remain to be counted in Sedgwick County and it will be Monday before final results can be known, according to the election office.
The county Election Board will meet Friday and decide which of those ballots to count and which to discard.
There are at least two elections that could go either way when the final votes are cast.
The most prominent is a dead heat in County Commission District 2, where Democratic challenger Sarah Lopez trailed incumbent Michael O’Donnell on election night, but caught up and passed him as mail votes were counted.
Lopez now leads that race by 125 votes. O’Donnell has announced that he won’t serve a second term after becoming embroiled in a scandal over a 2019 false attack ad against Wichita Mayor Brandon Whipple.
If O’Donnell wins in the final count, his successor will be elected by about two dozen Republican Party stalwarts in his district. Five Republicans have already put their hats in that ring.
Another race closely watched is the State Board of Education seat in District 8. There, former Wichita school board member Betty Arnold, a Democrat, leads Republican incumbent Kathy Busch by 1,734, with more than 91,000 votes counted so far.
The county’s Election Board, made up of the five county commissioners or their designees, will meet at 8:30 a.m. Friday to make the final decisions on which votes to count.
Deputy Election Commissioner Melissa Schnieders said Thursday that the election office will recommend counting about 7,000 remaining ballots.
The Election Board will reconvene Monday to certify the election and make the results final and official.
The remaining uncounted ballots are mostly a combination of provisional votes, plus mail ballots that had issues that needed to be cured.
Voters whose ballot envelopes were not properly signed were notified by mail and allowed to correct flaws up until 5 p.m Thursday.
That was also the deadline for in-person voters who didn’t have photo ID on Election Day to provide that.
This story was originally published November 12, 2020 at 1:32 PM.
