The Vanderburgh County Election Board certified the 2024 General Election on Friday. After every election, the board meets to go over rejected or late ballots, and interpret the law as to whether the vote should count.
There were more than 100 ballots to be considered — not an unusual number of errors.
“We always have some of these people go to vote and they're not registered,” said Clerk of the Courts Marsha Barnhart. “Or are they moved and they're just things that we have to decide, ‘does this fall within the statute,’ which is why we have an attorney here with the statute book.”
Some mistakes were made by poll workers, others were by the voter.
Non-registered voters were rejected, while a couple voted via mail when they initially requested to vote digitally from Mexico. Their ballots were accepted.
Some ballots had to be "remade" and rescanned.
After two hours of either accepting or rejecting ballots, the board was able to certify the election as a whole. Barnhart said these ballots don’t affect any of the races this time.
“This is a small number of errors with 74,000 votes,” she said. “So I hope people are not disillusioned and continue to vote.”
The ballot total jumped by 111 votes to 74,605.
Aside from ballots with errors, more than 400 mail-in-ballots were never returned. Barnhart doubts it’s because the resident simply decided not to vote.
“We have some that happens every year, but not this many, and these people have gone to all their trouble to fill out an application, sign it, mail it into us. I suspect that they're planning to vote, and we probably we did send them a ballot. We know the ballot left our office.”
Chad Sullivan, board president, said, “we have received phone calls from folks understandably upset — they requested a mail-in (ballot) and never saw it or didn't even receive it until close to or after the deadline.”
This is likely due to the mail sorting happening outside of the area. Immediately there is no easy solution.
Vote tabulating also lasted two days, and Barnhart said this is exacerbated by the slow tally machines mandated by the state.
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