Ballot error led to late vote counts
Officials say two county school board races should not have been included on city precinct ballots.
A simple ballot error made Floyd County one of the last five of Georgia’s 159 counties to report election results, local officials said Wednesday.
The two county school board seats were included on ballots for the six city precincts although Rome residents — who have a separate school system — are ineligible to vote in those races.
Elections Board Chairman Steve Miller said Wednesday the two races had to be manually removed from those precincts’ memory cards before the results from any precincts could be tabulated and reported.
“The error in the ballot happened in the (county elections) office and I can assure you it will not happen again,” Miller said. “We’ll have a meeting to discuss it, but we’re going to have more than two people proofreading the ballots from now on.”
The Elections Board functions as a quasi-authority, separate from the county government. County Manager Jamie McCord said the Floyd County Commission appoints the board, which
in turn hires the elections supervisor and oversees the elections office.
“You don’t want to have an elected official running an election,” McCord said. “There’s a separation there for a good reason.”
Elections Supervisor Willie Green said his office develops the ballot information for each precinct, based on voting district lines, and transmits the information to the Georgia secretary of state’s office. The state elections office creates the electronic ballots.
His office missed the inclusion of the county races during the proofreading process, he said, and by the time they realized the error it was too late.
“Without that error, it would have been a significantly smoother election,” Green said.
Miller said they prepared for Tuesday’s primary by bringing in a technician from ES & S, the company that makes the electronic voting equipment. But the process of removing the races took longer than expected.
Thirty-three precinct cards and 21 early-voting cards were affected, and both races had to be zeroed out separately. Miller and the other Election Board members, Mardi Haynes-Jackson and Dr. Tom Rees, uploaded the cards and watched the tech erase the races.
“It’s not an easy process, to zero it out,” Miller said. “I can’t tell you exactly how it’s done without sharing proprietary information, but it’s lengthy. And I guess that’s a good thing, for security purposes.”
The memory cards for the last affected city precinct were handed over to the board for processing at 9:15 p.m., Miller said. After that was done, Elections Board members started counting the votes from all 25 precincts and transmitting the results to the secretary of state’s office.
Miller said it typically takes about two hours to count and transmit all the votes once the cards start coming in.
Polls close at 7 p.m., he noted, but precinct managers still have to serve the last voters in line, gather the memory cards from each machine and drive to the County Administration Building where they’re checked in by elections staff.
“We should be able to get done by 9:30 or 10 o’clock, for a good time frame,” Miller said. “We actually had these done by 11 p.m., so we weren’t too far off.”
The precinct and jurisdiction-wide vote summaries were then uploaded to the county website, a process that kept elections officials at the administration building until after midnight.
Republicans Chip Hood and Tony Daniel are unopposed for re-election to the county school board, so the erroneous votes would not have affected the overall result of those races.