Sedgwick County audit finds 382 missed ballots; 10,200 left to be counted by Monday
Sedgwick County’s Election Board voted Friday to count 10,200 remaining ballots from the Nov. 3 election and reject about 2,000 for a variety of flaws.
The county’s election commissioner also announced that random auditing that began last year bore its first fruit this election, catching 382 ballots that should have been counted, but weren’t.
The five-member Election Board met Friday with Election Commissioner Tabitha Lehman to start the process of “canvassing” the votes.
It’s a procedure that takes place after every election to examine questionable ballots and weed out those that shouldn’t legally be counted.
The votes that passed Friday’s examination will be tallied over the weekend by the election office, with final results in all races expected to be reported at noon Monday.
Lehman would ordinarily have led the board through the canvassing in person. But this time, she had to appear by remote conferencing because she’s been undergoing chemotherapy for cancer and can’t risk exposure to the coronavirus that’s caused the COVID-19 pandemic.
The post-election audit that caught the 382 uncounted ballots was required by a state law that passed in 2018 and took effect in January 2019.
That law mandates a hand-count of ballots from at least 1 percent of precincts, to check the accuracy of voting machines and the people who run them.
In this election, the machines were accurate but the problem was an operator error, Lehman said.
A vote-counting machine jammed and election workers didn’t follow on-screen instructions on how to count the rest of the batch that was going through when the machine stalled, Lehman said.
Instead, they put the uncounted ballots in the “counted” bins, Lehman said.
“Unfortunately, workers did not follow the procedures and proper disciplinary action is being taken to correct that,” she said.
The error was correctable without a full recount and has been corrected, Lehman said.
The counting machine takes an image of each ballot as it goes through, so election officials were able to isolate and identify the 382 valid ballots that hadn’t been counted, Lehman said.
But the error couldn’t have come at a worse time, with the national election razor-close and supporters of President Donald Trump looking for any evidence they can find to discredit the election and cast doubt on former Vice President Joe Biden’s apparent win.
“Obviously, this is devastating to me to have to report this,” Lehman said, her voice cracking with emotion. “My staff has worked so hard this election and done such a phenomenal job. And then for a mistake like this to be made is just devastating for all of us, so we sincerely apologize.”
She said it’s not like situations in other states where partisans have raised doubts about ballots supposedly being “found” late in the counting process.
“This is a very important distinction I want to make: these ballots were not ‘found’ anywhere,” Lehman said. “They were literally in our possession under lock and key the entire time. They’re valid ballots.”
In future elections, the number of ballots in each batch of votes will be counted and checked against the machine’s tally to ensure there aren’t any discrepancies, Lehman said.
“This will slow down the process significantly, but obviously it is very clear that we need to protect against this ever happening again,” Lehman said.
The largest category of still-to-be counted votes consists of provisional ballots, which are cast by people when there is some question as to whether they are eligible to vote.
The biggest number of those, roughly 4,300, were cast by people who had requested mail ballots, but then decided to vote in person instead.
There are substantially more of those than usual this year, because high interest in the presidential race sparked unusually high turnout and both sides in the election harbored concerns that the Postal Service wouldn’t be able to return ballots in time to be counted.
Also, this was the first election where people could check online to see if their mail ballots had been received and processed. The large number of ballots received led to delays in processing, which in turn caused some voters to get antsy when they didn’t see their mail ballots as having been received, she said.
The next largest category of provisional votes, 1,585, consisted of people who had recently moved and needed to update their address at the polling place before they voted.
Another 1,443 voters cast ballots at the wrong polling place. Their votes will be counted, but only for races they’d be eligible to vote in if they’d voted at their home precinct, Lehman said.
The lion’s share of the rejected ballots, nearly 1,600, came from people who cast provisional ballots in Sedgwick County although they don’t live here. That category included voters who weren’t registered to vote in Kansas at all and Kansas residents who voted in the wrong county.
Under state law, voters can only have their ballots counted if they vote in the county where they live, Lehman said.
Other ballots were rejected in small batches for a variety of procedural flaws, including missing signatures on mail ballots or failure to submit required photo ID when voting in person.
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.
This story was originally published November 13, 2020 at 3:34 PM.
