New election results are expected today in Elmore County, where four school-related elections — including one decided by a single vote — could shift.
Three hundred ballots cast on Election Day were not tallied, Secretary of State Phil McGrane told a crowd of about 20 observers at the Elk’s Lodge in Mountain Home early Monday morning. He is now leading a team of 18 staff members from his office as they hand count approximately 3,100 ballots. Three teams of four seated at folding tables are methodically counting every vote on every ballot in Elmore County.
The 300 ballots were never lost or missing, he said, but he’s not sure how the discrepancy occurred.
“We’re still trying to figure that out,” McGrane told EdNews. “That’s what this process is for.”
Four tightly contested school-related elections hang in the balance.
- The Mountain Home School District’s $6.2 million supplemental levy passed by 20 votes.
- Voters in Elmore and Owyhee counties supported keeping Bruneau Elementary School open by a 59-vote margin.
- A Glenns Ferry School District trustee race between winner Robert Bergh and runner-up Alan Crane was decided by one vote.
- Three votes made the difference in a Bruneau-Grand View School District trustee race between winner Raelynn Mathews and runner-up Jeremy Pineda.
Sen. Christy Zito, R-Mountain Home, observed the recount. As a resident of Elmore County, she said it felt like it was her civic duty to attend.
“Being involved in the government that is of the people,” Zito said. “It’s important that we participate.”
Elmore County Sheriff Mike Hollinshead was charged with securing the ballots through the process. He held the door open as a deputy used a handcart to bring red boxes filled with all 3,100 ballots into the Elk’s Lodge.
County Clerk Shelley Essl then opened the red boxes and officials distributed the paper ballots among the three tables. She said she hopes McGrane and his staff will help find out what happened. She initially noticed a discrepancy when she looked at the total ballots cast compared with how many were counted.
“Something happened in the processing of those, because all the ballots are accounted for,” Essl said. “They were always accounted for.”
The results will “definitely” be complete today, she added.
“Once they start counting, they can’t stop,” she said.
Inside the process
Three teams of four today are hand counting 3,100 ballots. Secretary of State Phil McGrane told the 20 observers at the Elk’s Lodge in Mountain Home how the process works:“With the hand count process,” McGrane said. “There’s always the opportunity for human error, both on the tally side and the reading side, so we have safeguards in place.”
- One person at each table looks at a ballot and reads the results aloud.
- The person sitting next to them looks over their shoulder to double check.
- Sitting opposite, two people record each vote in separate tally books. They occasionally check in to make sure their tallies match.
This is the same process the state uses for every recount or audit, and is based on best practices nationally.
After the count is complete, the Elmore County Board of County Commissioners will meet as the Board of Canvassers to canvass the results. Then the count goes to judicial review.
“A judge will ultimately do the assessment of what are the implications here and, if necessary in any instance, a new election would need to be called,” McGrane said. “But by the end of the day we will have new results.”
McGrane said he can’t recall a situation like this, where every vote in every race in the county needs to be recounted.
“It’s more important that we take our time and are very deliberate about everything that we do, rather than trying to hurry to get results,” he said.
EdNews will update this story throughout the day.
1:20 p.m.: After Pizza Hut for lunch, McGrane said his team had completed counting all of the ballots cast on Election Day. They are now sorting absentee and early ballots, as they were not previously broken out by precinct. “We’re going to start with the sorting and separation, and then we’ll go into the tallying, just like we were earlier,” he said.
2:30 p.m.: Several candidates for city council and other offices are waiting for results at the Elk’s Lodge, including Alan Crane, who lost his trustee race in Glenns Ferry School District by one vote. Candidate Robert Bergh won with 35 votes.
With the race so close, Crane said he decided to ask for a recount the day after the election. Now, with the recount unfolding before him, he said it’s like Election Day all over again.
“My initial gut feeling was it wasn’t right, but when it came out that there were 300 misplaced ballots or whatever happened, it was kind of overwhelming,” Crane told EdNews.
A former city council member in Glenns Ferry, Crane said he decided to run for school board because the district keeps losing kids to homeschooling. He said he wants the district to invest in its agriculture program to bring those kids back.
“Being in an ag community, we really need to capitalize on what we already have there,” he said.
This story was written by Sean Dolan of Idaho Education News.