Lynn Ellins, the county’s election supervisor and clerk-elect, promised to investigate what caused the situation and come up with solutions.
“I have all kinds of ideas for improvement,” Ellins said at today’s meeting of the commission.
But first comes the canvass of the county’s election results, which will begin Friday and should be wrapped up by Sunday. Some 2,100 provisional ballots must be considered.
That includes 624 provisional ballots that were cast in Senate District 37. The only race still in contention is that Senate contest between Republican Leonard Lee Rawson and Democrat Steve Fischmann. Fischmann has a 505-vote lead so, considering that a large percentage of provisional ballots are historically thrown out as invalid, it’s highly unlikely Rawson, the Senate minority whip and a senator since 1987, can come back to win.
Ellins said he won’t have time to complete an investigation into the absentee ballot situation before the commission meets on Wednesday to certify the election results, but he hopes to be able to provide commissioners with a better idea of the scope of the problem on Wednesday.
The county didn’t comply during the election cycle with a law requiring that absentee ballots be mailed out within 24 hours of the office receiving requests for the ballots and, as of Tuesday morning, 3,844 people who had requested absentee ballots had not yet voted. Several counties were swamped with absentee-ballot requests, but
Ellins provided one clue at the meeting about the problem:
“We have records. We mailed some out to the husband and the wife on the same day. The husband gets it. The wife doesn’t. I can’t explain it,” Ellins said. “Once we let the ballot out of the office and into the post office, there’s no telling what happened, but we’ll look into it.”
At the meeting, Commissioner Bill McCamley said he personally knows two people who didn’t get to vote because they didn’t receive their ballots — his grandmother, who was physically unable to vote in person, and a friend who is a college student in Washington, D.C. — but, despite that, he said this election was much smoother than past elections.
“We’ve made a lot of progress in how elections are done,” McCamley said.
Commissioner Oscar Vásquez Butler said legislative changes may be needed. Thomas E. Fry, a county resident, suggested to commissioners that the state should move up the date that absentee ballots can be mailed out by at least two weeks. State law currently allows counties to begin mailing ballots 28 days before Election Day.
The view the county’s unofficial election results, click here.