St. Joseph County Election official explains counting delay
Many people, including media and candidates, questioned why the election results in St. Joseph County were delayed on Tuesday night.
WSBT spoke with the St. Joseph County Election Board Chair, Democrat Chuck Leone, and here is what he had to say.
While polls closed at 6pm, there were multiple polling centers where voters were still in line waiting to vote.
Leone said the SJC Election Board didn’t want to release any results while all voters had not cast their ballots.
The process to count mail-in and early voting started at 8 a.m. and additional safeguards added by the state to the count process, added time. Verification was, at times, conducted on those ballots by the entire election board.
The Polling Center votes were delivered to the tabulation center in a flash drive format, that’s a different process than the process used to count the mail-in and early voting votes.
The election board stayed with the mail-in and absentee vote process until those were completed before they started to count the in-person votes.
That was a judgement call to not do both processes at once.
Turnout:
36.9 % of registered voters in SJC cast ballots in the November 8th election.
72,672 ballots
196,917 total registered voters in SJC.
Mail-in and Absentee: about 6-7,000
Early vote: about 16,000
Straight Ticket:
Democrat: 21,085
Republican: 22,427
Leone also said the process went “fairly smoothly,”
The Election Board did have to address multiple questions regarding electioneering, but he says they worked through all of them perhaps not to the satisfaction of all involved.
