Court orders Greene County to count 199 ‘uncured’ mail-in ballots
Greene County officials are in the process of recertifying their election results after a judge mandated they count nearly 200 “uncured” mail-in ballots that mistakenly included multiple district magistrate races for voters to choose.
President Judge Lou Dayich recently ordered the county elections office to parse through all mail-in ballots with that error and segregate the ones that were returned by voters who did not attempt to get another ballot as county officials had asked they do after they discovered the mistake in mid-October.
The 199 “uncured” ballots from that first-batch sent out did not change any races of named candidates on the ballot, Greene County Commission Chairman Mike Belding said, although it could alter write-in races for lesser offices in which few votes were cast.
Belding said the bulk of the “uncured” ballots were located in Franklin Township, where 40 of them were recorded. The Franklin Township supervisors’ race was within that total with Democrat William Walker leading Republican James McCalle by 14 votes on election night. Walker extended his lead after more ballots were counted, Belding said, although the final results have not been released.
“I really don’t think there will be a change at all,” Belding said of the races with named candidates on the ballots. “But they’re going through the write-ins now.”
With no elections director currently in office, the county brought in the department’s former leader, Judy Snyder, who served in a part-time role to oversee the updated count.
During a special meeting Monday, the county’s elections board, which includes Belding, Michael Lubich and Larry Stratton, unanimously voted on a motion to ask the court to accept the updated count and allow them to petition the state Department of State to recertify the results. That could happen later this month, although no date has been set to hold another meeting to once again certify the results.
The issue of the “uncured” ballots was one of two mistakes with mail-in and absentee ballots that nearly derailed the Nov. 7 election in Greene County over concerns that close races could be marred by the election officials’ errors.
In the first batch of mail-in ballots sent out in early October, both magisterial district judge races were included on all ballots rather than being tailored to the races where the voter lived. The county recalled those original ballots and printed new ones. But not everyone returned the second ballots, prompting the court order to count the “uncured” ballots.
The second batch sent out also included erroneous instructions to vote for three commissioners candidates, although it was too late to recall those. Elections officials once again sent out information asking people to come to the office and vote on a new mail-in ballot or vote provisionally at their precinct.
Out of the nearly 1,500 mail-in ballots cast in Greene County, more than one-third of them – 548 in total – had “overvotes” in the commissioners race. However, the amount of them was too low to affect the final results of the commissioners race.
Meanwhile, the county is preparing to interview candidates next week for the elections director position. The county has had five different people to hold the position since September 2020 when the commissioners demoted longtime director Tina Kiger. There is no timeline to hire a new elections director.