When the Pickaway County Primary Board of Elections met Friday to certify the results of the Primary Election — no races or levy votes changed.
“We had a little snafu. On election night, you always get the unofficial results pf the election because there are absentee ballots coming in and there are provisional ballots that the board needs to act upon. Today (Friday), these are official. We had a little snafu,” BOE Chairman David Winner said, “but it did not change any of the actual results that you saw on primary night.”
Earlier this week, the Herald filed a Public Records Request with the BOE to find out more about what happened when the BOE found a discrepancy in their unofficial results — more about that below.
As they say in Eastern North Carolina, long story-short, the BOE was able to go back through to check the votes so as to confirm the numbers.
Essentially, much like sailing where you build in redundancy as a precaution, the BOE built redundancies into the system to preserve election integrity.
Flashback to last Saturday when the Pickaway County Board of Elections (BOE) released a letter Saturday explaining that there was a “discrepancy in the unofficial election results which added more absentee vote totals than were cast for all candidates.” Online version of that story contains a link to the Herald’s story about the matter.
The BOE reported that the discrepancy resulted when a USB thumb drive containing a “test data pattern” was inserted into the tabulating computer by mistake. The data included votes for candidates on the Pickaway County ballot.
Thus, the unofficial results include these test data votes, which will need to be subtracted from the unofficial votes as part of the process to determine the official results.
The USB information was erased after the votes were uploaded into the tabulating computer. The official Pickaway County ballot was used in the test data pattern. The votes that were added in error are known and are documented.
Until Friday’s BOE meeting, the BOE did not release that data or even how many votes were in the test data pattern.
Additionally, there are 117 provisional ballots that are still being reviewed for addition to the unofficial results. Also, as of election day, there were 68 absentee ballots that had not been returned.
Only 18 have now been deemed valid as they had to be postmarked on or before March 18 and received in the mail at the BOE by Saturday, May 23 .
The unofficial results, which were released on March 19, will not be updated or changed until the release of the official results. Those unofficial results showed that there were 36,996 registered voters, and, as of March 19, there were 15,096 Total ballots cast for a turnout of 40.8%.
The website data also shows mail absentee ballots received as on March 19 were 2,464 with 1,887 of them were cast in the Republican primary.
Fast forward to the present when the official election results were released by the BOE on Friday.
BOE Director Matthew Nicklas informed the audience that there would be a “post-election audit” and, according to Ohio Revised Code regulations, there were 4 races that were selected for a hand recount. The sheriff’s contact and three Republican Central Committee races were chosen at random to be the contests to be audited.
Nicklas said the BOE does this post-election audit after every election and the results match 100% every time. He invited the audience to witness the audit which will be held at 9 a.m. on Thursday, April 11 at the BOE office at 141 West Main Street Suite 800 in Circleville. The public is also invited to attend the regular meeting of the BOE at 2 p.m. that same day where the results of the post-election audit will be made public.
Last thing: Nicklas responded to the Herald’s Public Records Request on Friday after the votes were officially tabulated.
“Thank you for your concerns and your request for additional information regarding the recent discrepancy related to the unofficial results of the March 19, 2024, primary election,” he wrote.
Nicklas provided four files attached with a brief explanation of what each file contains to assist in understanding what transpired. The online version of this story contains those files.
A. 20240319_First Upload_Absentee Only.pdf
a. These are the first results posted and contained the accurate unofficial counts of the “In Office Absentee” and “Mail Absentee” data received by 7:30pm election night.
B. 20240319_Second Upload.pdf
a. This results report was generated AFTER the USB drive had been inserted and the “test deck” data was inadvertently added to the earlier absentee results.
C. 20240319_Test Deck Expected Results.pdf
a. Each column has a heading which is relabeled to match the equipment tested (Election Day = ExpressVote Machines; Mail Absentee = DS200 Tabulator; Provisional = DS450 Tabulator). These heading changes do not correspond to the election night reports in any way.
b. The third column (Provisional/DS450 Tabulator) contains the expected results of the pre-filled optical scan ballots run through the DS450 Tabulator. The USB drive inserted on election night contained these results which were added to the unofficial totals.
D. 20240319_Pickaway_Unofficial_Groups_20240319215804.pdf
a. This is the Unofficial Results Report signed off on at the end of the night.
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