LEXINGTON, Ky. — Computer glitches in reporting, including the votes cast for write-in candidates, apparently are delaying completed Kentucky vote tallies.
Almost no votes cast for write-in candidates, including in the Sixth Congressional District where Democrat Randy Cravens challenged both Republican incumbent Andy Barr and official party nominee Geoff Young, were appearing in vote totals or percentages of votes cast.
At mid-afternoon, the only votes listed for write-in Cravens were 15 votes in Fleming County and 94 in Mercer County; the other counties in the district, including Fayette, show only votes for Barr and Young.
Fayette County Clerk Don Blevins Jr. did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
In other cases, counties reported the results but they have yet to show up on the state’s site.
The Kentucky Board of Elections, which reports the vote totals, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Legislative Oversight & Investigations Committee is scheduled to hear from election officials about the state process at a 1 p.m. hearing Thursday.
Counties reported results that aren’t showing
According to the Secretary of State’s website of live results, most Kentucky counties show that reporting has been completed, with a few counties showing that partial results have been reported. And, as of noon Nov. 9, 15 counties showed that reporting had “not started.” By 3 p.m., there were still three counties without any votes showing and two with only partial counts showing.
The numbers for each county are fed into the site by the State Board of Elections, according to a spokeswoman for Secretary of State Michael Adams.
One of the counties that showed no results in at noon was Woodford County, but county clerk Sandra Jones said Wednesday that all votes were tallied and reported late Tuesday. By 2:45 p.m. Wednesday, the results were showing as “completed.”
“The state board of elections rolled out a new end-of-night report system on Friday. I’m not sure what happened on their end but ... it just failed,” Jones said. She said they tried over and over to get the results to the state. “It wouldn’t transmit. So we were advised to send another way, which we did, and they couldn’t get our numbers in before the system went down.”
She said the vote totals will be on the Woodford County official website and on the county clerk’s site later today.
“I do terribly regret the implication we were not proficient enough to tabulate and transmit the results,” she said.
Write-in votes missing in many counties
In other counties that showed as “complete,” the results were missing write-in votes.
Scott County Clerk Rebecca M. Johnson said Wednesday that her office had notified the state Wednesday morning that the county’s write-in votes were not appearing.
“I can’t speak for what issues they might be having at state level. We are working now to have them show our write-in candidate vote totals,” Johnson said. All the votes, including those for the county’s three certified write-in candidates, had been reported to the state board of elections Tuesday night, she said.
Johnson said that delays also occurred Tuesday night at the state level with the question of how to deal with votes cast for withdrawn candidates. That issue has been resolved, she said.
She said that Scott County had hoped to report to voters directly the unofficial county vote totals via a Facebook Live broadcast as they did during the primary but there were connectivity issues. Instead, they handed out paper copies of the returns to those at the courthouse, where a copy is posted as well.
The county board of elections had to hand-count all the write-in votes last night, she said. And they reported them. But noticed they are not showing up on the state site.
“We’ve just called to address that we’re not seeing our write-in candidate report totals,” she said. “We’re hoping this will be updated very soon.”
She pointed to the race for Scott County coroner, which the state election site shows with 100% of the vote counted for Mark Sutton. In reality, she said, write-in candidate Lana Pennington got more than 7% of the vote. The total number of votes shown does not reflect those votes either, she said.
“It’s not going to change his vote total, but we need our write in candidates to appear on this report,” she said. “It’s not going to change the outcome or any vote totals, but the percent appears to be skewed.”
