A recount of votes cast during the June 25 primary election for Utah’s 2nd Congressional District has yielded the same result. Rep. Celeste Maloy remains in front of challenger Colby Jenkins.
The vote tallies changed slightly and Maloy’s lead dwindled from 214 votes to 176 following the recount. Maloy gained 28 votes and Jenkins gained 65, but the incumbent still secured a little over 50% of the vote.
Jenkins requested the recount on July 30. He has also filed suit with the Utah Supreme Court over uncounted ballots with late postmarks.
As the 13 counties in Utah’s 2nd Congressional District went through the ballots, two counties, Tooele and Washington, ran into the same issue with adjudicated ballots.
Those are the ballots where clerks needed to verify the voter’s intent, like if a voter accidentally selected the wrong candidate and crossed out their first choice.
Tooele County Clerk Tracy Shaw said the tabulation machine “would just read that as a vote for both candidates,” also known as an “overvote,” which isn’t allowed. So, clerks verify each adjudicated ballot and make the changes in the voting system accordingly. During the recount, Shaw said they made the appropriate changes to adjudicated ballots in the system so they couldn’t be tabulated as overvotes.
“When we push[ed] a button to apply the changes that we make with those adjudicated ballots. And we got an error message that kind of just snagged us,” she said.
They essentially refreshed the software, pushed the button again and Shaw said the error message went away and the team was under the impression that their changes to the ballots had gone through.
“Everything in the system seemed to indicate that except for the report itself, the numbers just didn't spit out correctly.”
Shaw’s team figured out the ballots were being counted and saved, but the tabulation software wasn’t reporting it accurately. They hand-counted ballots in some precincts to ensure it wasn’t a human error, too. They called the vendor, Elections Systems & Software, to inform them of the issue. Shaw said the company immediately investigated and discovered “there was just one other county, Washington County, that was found to have had that error and nobody else seemed to.”
In a statement, Elections Systems & Software confirmed “that the adjudicated ballots were correctly counted and recorded; however, [the result] had not successfully saved to the reporting module.”
Shaw said the agency offered a “band-aid” solution to the issue by tabulating adjudicated ballots in “very small batches.”
“We had to do that over and over again … in order to get to the end results where the reports were spitting out correctly.”
The tabulation snag meant some initial vote totals were off on Election Night. After the recount, Shaw said 37 additional votes were added for Jenkins and 18 for Maloy. In Washington County, Jenkins picked up 26 votes, while an additional 10 votes went to Maloy.
Washington County did not return KUER’s interview request.
It’s still unclear what caused the error. Identifying the issue is going to take longer than clerks have to finish the recount, Shaw said, which was a week according to Utah code.
In the end, Shaw felt comfortable sending off the recount results to the board of canvassers after making sure the software results aligned with the hand-counted votes.
“There's really nothing worse than being the bearer of bad news that our software has problems. That's the last thing any election official wants to tell the world,” Shaw said.
“But I’m also not going to sign my name or present numbers to my board of canvassers that I don't have confidence in either.”
Elections Systems & Software said they are investigating the issue, along with the state.
“Nothing is more important to state and local election officials than ensuring that every eligible vote is accurately counted,” Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson said in an Aug. 2 statement. “This is part of the process and why we have recounts.”
“I am grateful to Tooele County Clerk Tracy Shaw who, because of her diligence, discovered this issue, brought it to our attention, and corrected it.”
