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    • Vanderburgh County Election Results Delayed
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    Vanderburgh County Election Results Delayed

    Umito Posted on

    EVANSVILLE — The popularity of in-person early voting, years-long efforts for better election security and the technological challenges that come with it made for a complex mix that kept Vanderburgh County voters from knowing who won Tuesday.

    Let’s start with the unofficial fact that some 40,000 Vanderburgh County residents voted early in person at libraries, while a few thousand others mailed absentee ballots.

    Importantly, the number of in-person early votes far exceeded the approximately 30,000 people who voted on Election Day.

    And that’s part of why the Vanderburgh County Elections Office called it a day Tuesday night, saying workers would return at 7:30 a.m. Wednesday to continue tabulating ballots likely into the afternoon.

    “We could be here until 1 or 2 (a.m.) and we wouldn’t be able to go through all these (ballots),” a tired county clerk, Marsha Abell Barnhart, said Tuesday evening.

    The problem Tuesday was…

    Improving election security was a focus in 2019, when then-Indiana Secretary of State Holli Sullivan introduced “voter-verified paper audit trail” (VVPAT) technology ) one of its main legislative priorities. Sullivan, a Vanderburgh County resident, said voters “appreciate the added security of paper trails they provide when they vote.”

    Vanderburgh County got its VVPAT technology in time for the 2020 presidential election with more than $2.2 million from Sullivan’s office after the state agency secured a federal Help America Vote Act grant. This saved the county nearly a quarter of a million dollars. In 2022, the Indiana General Assembly would require the VVPAT to be used in all Indiana counties during the next presidential election in 2024.

    For voters who voted on Election Day, VVPAT means using ballot marking devices that generate grocery receipt-sized ballots that they can check for accuracy and edit if necessary before to place them in an optical scanning device to deposit and count them.

    During in-person early voting, a voter seals a paper ballot produced by a marking device in an envelope. He then places it in a box.

    The underlying problem: The VVPAT is an entirely different animal from the electronic voting machines the county used before 2020. Counting paper ballots takes more time than relying on electronic voting machine software.

    The even bigger problem: State law doesn’t allow vote counters to begin opening in-person ballot envelopes and scanning ballots until Election Day. In Vanderburgh County, vote counters traditionally begin their work at 8 a.m., just after voting centers go live.

    The number of in-person early votes cast in Vanderburgh County for this election has overwhelmed workers tasked with processing them, Doug Briody of the elections office said Tuesday evening.

    “This cannot be physically completed tonight with the technology and restrictions that the Indiana Legislature has placed on counties counting votes,” said Briody, a longtime attorney for the Vanderburgh County Board of Elections. “We couldn’t start anything until today. Everything can’t be done in one day in a county our size.”

    The technology itself isn’t necessarily a problem, said Briody, who pointed out that the vote cast on Election Day was counted just hours earlier. This is the restriction prohibiting early in-person vote counting before Election Day.

    In fact, Briody said, the technology is essentially the same whether voters vote early or on Election Day.

    “The problem is that (ballots) are supposed to be counted one by one when the voter finishes voting and puts it in the box like on Election Day,” the election lawyer said.

    “If we could use the same technology for early voting and have running totals every day over the 28 days leading up to Election Day, we would have completed the entire process a few hours ago. But the law State prohibits it.”

    Carla Hayden, Barnhart’s predecessor as Vanderburgh County elections director, had the same problem.

    Hayden declared to Courrier & Press in 2022 that the answer lies in allowing election officials to “start (scanning ballots) up front instead of putting them in these envelopes and waiting.”

    It wasn’t the only problem

    Those grocery receipts that voters can check for accuracy and change if necessary? They’re not always so easy to deal with, Barnhart said Tuesday evening.

    “They’re like little cassettes, little cash register cassettes, and you have to put them in one by one,” the employee said. “And every once in a while the machine stops because there’s something – like, there’s one that an election worker had a minute ago, someone had sanitizer on their hands and put a movie on the cassette.

    “The machine stopped for different things like that.”

    By Tuesday evening, it became clear to Barnhart and Briody that there was no way to finish the job and release the final election results without forcing employees to work into the wee hours of the morning. Many of them had been working since the early hours of the previous morning.

    Briody has shown the way forward.

    “We are awaiting the final unofficial count (Wednesday) afternoon and the final official results will be certified next Friday (November 15), 10 days after the election, as required by state law,” he said. he declared.

    Umito
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