After reviewing video footage in response to finding 66 absentee ballots that were not reported for the Primary Election, the Daviess County Board of Elections is implementing new steps to improve the process for counting votes going forward.
During the state audit, the Daviess County Clerk’s Office noticed that there appeared to be a discrepancy in the absentee mail-in ballot count. Previous reporting from the system had reported 16,103 ballots returned, with 15,297 being counted through the Escan machines and 740 rejected for numerous reasons.
“These counts left a discrepancy of 66 ballots unaccounted for. Because we did the process different for this Election relying more on the computer system instead (of) manual checks, we didn’t identify this until the Attorney General’s Audit Process,” the addendum reads.
A breakdown of the 66 ballots is included in the addendum, which can be read in full below. The addendum was sent on Aug. 24 to the Daviess County Grand Jury, State Board of Elections, and the Attorney General’s Office.
Because ballot processing was recorded, the Clerk’s Office is able to review the video to determine why the mistake was made.
“The process of the opening of the ballots has been video achieved, and we are currently still reviewing several days of footage to try and find where the major error occurred,” Chief Deputy Clerk Richard House wrote in an email. “In addition, we have also learned from watching the video footage so that we can improve the process for the fall as well as future elections.”
According to House, the following steps will be put in place for the General Election:
- The entire processing operation will occur in a larger space located in the basement of the Daviess County Courthouse.
- Only two members of the processing committee (one Republican and one Democrat) work in teams at one particular table handling only sets of no more than 20 ballots at time. These individuals will complete an audit log on the set of ballots that they process before they move them to a scanner; on the audit log there will be a starting PVT Counter number and an ending PVT Counter number to verify that each set was indeed scanned into the voting machine.
- One Republican and one Democrat will act as overseers monitoring the room’s processes.
- A group of individuals will manually review all opened envelopes for a second verification to prevent this specific problem from occurring again before being boxed up and removed to a storage room.
- Any rejected ballots will be hand-delivered by select individuals to members of the Daviess County Clerk’s Office Staff to be entered into the system and then logged into a spreadsheet, which will be used as a second check on the rejection report.
House added, “There will be other processes put in place to ensure that issues don’t occur again as we continue our review. The Attorney General Election Audit is still in progress and will be completed at a later date.”
The addendum is included below:
