Ballot differences don’t affect Latah County election results

Tuesday night’s hand count of the Latah County election ballots did not perfectly match Wednesday’s electronic count, but the discrepancies were not significant enough to change the outcome of any races.

According to the unofficial results, Sandra Kelly, Drew Davis and Bryce Blankenship have earned seats on the Moscow City Council. They lead Evan Holmes, Joe Campbell and Nathan Tupper.

Kelly received 3,243 votes, Davis 3,014 and Blankenship 2,710.

For the Moscow School Board race, the winners were incumbents Jim Frenzel (1,042 votes), Dulce Kersting-Lark (642 votes) and Dawna Fazio (351 votes). They defeated Cody Barr, Gay Lynn Clyde and Jim Gray.

Juliaetta Mayor Richard Groseclose (91 votes) won his reelection bid over Eric McDowell (39) and Jeff Lohman (25).

The election results will be canvassed during a meeting with the Latah County Commissioners next week.

In a change from previous elections, all the Latah County ballots were counted by hand on Election Day before they were counted by a machine Wednesday.

The hand count is part of Latah County Auditor Julie Fry’s effort to promote trust in the voting process by letting citizens participate in the counting process.

Sixty-six unpaid volunteers counted the results by hand Tuesday, Fry said. She said some of those volunteers counted the absentee and early votes from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday. The rest counted the votes at each polling location until as late as 12:30 a.m. Wednesday.

The volunteers separated into teams of four: a reader, an observer and two people who tally votes.

The reader announced the names of the candidates who received votes on each ballot. Two people tallied those votes while an observer helped ensure the count was accurate.

On Wednesday, those ballots were fed through a DS450 voting machine in the Latah County Courthouse that automatically tallied each ballot.

If there was an issue with the ballot, like a marking it did not recognize, the machine would not count that ballot. Sometimes there is an issue with determining a voter’s intent. For example, a voter may have made a mistake and crossed out a name on the ballot.

Every time a ballot was rejected by the machine, an adjudication team of county employees would then review the ballot themselves.

Fry said Tuesday’s volunteers may have interpreted the voter’s intent differently than her adjudication team, which is likely the reason why several of the election results did not perfectly match.

“Our thoughts could differ from the people who were counting, so that could explain these small changes,” she said.

The biggest difference was in the Moscow School Board race between Gay Lynn Clyde and Dulce Kersting-Lark.

Kersting-Lark still won by a large margin, but both candidates received dozens more votes following the machine count. Fry said there was no issue with the hand count, but these votes were mistakenly omitted from the Excel sheet Fry’s office used to upload the results to the Idaho Secretary of State website early Wednesday morning.

Fry said she thought the hand-count went well and praised the volunteers for being “very studious” with the process.

Fry said she does not plan to count votes by hand during next year’s elections.

Kuipers can be reached at akuipers@dnews.com.