Miami County Election Recount

Yesterday and Thursday the recount commission gathered to determine the winner of the election in Miami County for Auditor and for Recorder. This is a tedious, yet necessary process to resolve a very close election.

Thursday consisted of recounting the voting machines. These include the machines used for absentee voting, sometimes called early voting, and those machines used in the 31 precincts on election day. Since we are a small county, this only amounted to sixty-nine machines with over 13,000 votes. We started at 8:00 am and finished around 6:00 pm.

Friday we hand counted all of the paper ballots, this kept us busy from 9:00 am until 10:00 pm. On election night, these ballots were scanned into a computer, much like tests are sometimes scanned in school. The scanner broke down on election night near the end of the counting, which added fuel to the fire when there was talk of a recount.

After we counted all of the paper ballots from mail-in, overseas, military, and provisional voters which was over 900 ballots, we then came up with totals for each of the candidates. The newspaper will be printing these preliminary results on Monday. We expect to arrive at our final results sometime on Monday, but for now Jane Lilley still has the lead for Auditor and Brenda Weaver still has the lead for Recorder.

Monday morning the commission will reconvene to determine the status of several ballots that raised a question Friday evening. Once this is determined, we will come up with final numbers that we can agree on, there will be discussion, then we will certify the results and file them with the County Clerk. She will then present them to Judge Banina for final approval.

I'm glad to have been a part of this, but I definitely would NOT want to do it for a living. My eyes still feel like their bugging out of my head!