Election officials in Harrisonburg addressed ballot counting issues that affected one city precinct the morning of Election Day, and assured citizens that their votes counted. WMRA's Randi B. Hagi reports.
Some voters at the Lucy Simms polling place on Tuesday morning found that the paper ballot scanner would not read their ballot. Harrisonburg Registrar Mark Finks said they brought in a back-up scanner and determined –
MARK FINKS: The problem wasn't with our scanners or with our tabulators. … We believe the problem was actually the ballots themselves, that we got from our vendor in North Carolina. As we printed some new ballots from our, what we call, ballot-on-demand system back at City Hall … and we test-ran those through the scanners at Simms, and those ballots were accepted.
He said 87 ballots were affected out of the 876 total cast at this precinct. Affected ballots were all collected in the scanner's "emergency slot" and hand-counted on election night.
FINKS: These sorts of issues can arise sometimes as we're dealing with technology, but we always have backups for these sorts of situations.
He said the counting machines had all been tested with paper ballots from this vendor, but they didn't receive the exact Election Day ballots until after the test. He plans to work with the vendor, Printelect, to figure out exactly what happened.
According to the Virginia Mercury, the state Elections Commissioner Steve Koski reported ballot printing problems in Carroll County and Waynesboro that were also handled by local elections officials.
