A malfunction of electronic voting equipment left 5,207 votes out of the original Nov. 4 Saline County vote total, but no election outcomes were affected, according to the Saline County Clerk’s Office. What was affected was a change in the percent of voter turnout, from 35.47 to 50.47 percent, and the total number of votes, 17,532 out of 34,735 registered voters. “That’s a huge difference,” county Chairman Randy Duncan said when notified by the Journal of the error. “That’s scary. That makes me wonder about voting machines. Should we go back to paper ballots?” Saline County Clerk Don Merriman said after the meeting that four of the 34 PEBs, or Personal Electronic Ballots, were not reading correctly on election night, which left the votes out of the original count. The problem has been fixed, he said. He said the missing votes weren’t discovered until after votes were canvassed on Nov. 10. Merriman said he learned of the error during a “triple check” with flash cards from the PEBs.
The commission learned of the error at its regular meeting Tuesday morning. Visiting with Jamie Robertson, deputy county clerk, Duncan commented on the low voter turnout in Saline County, which the commission was told was 35.49 percent after the canvass.
Robertson said the voter turnout was more than 50 percent. When commissioners said that wasn’t the figure they’d read, she went to the clerk’s office and returned with the correct figure and showed it to them. Later in the day, commissioners were informed by the Salina Journal of the change in the vote total, which explains the change in the percentage of those who voted.
Full Article: Malfunction results in missing votes | News | Salina Journal.