County Discovers BI Ballot Counting Mistake

By Rachel Pritchett  Kitsap Sun  September 29, 2005

Bainbridge Island

It was the ghost of elections past.  
A jam in a Kitsap County ballot-counting machine on primary election day Sept. 20 caused an miscount of 203 ballots too many, all from Bainbridge Island, according to county Auditor Karen Flynn.

The counting error was discovered during a ballot reconciliation process.

"We had more ballots counted than we had cast," Flynn said Wednesday.

The miscount did not affect the outcome of any races or ballot issues, Flynn said.

The batch of ballots being counted when the machine broke down came from all 22 Bainbridge precincts, according to Elections Manager Dolores Gilmore. Ballot counts on Bainbridge races and issues could have been incrementally changed by the miscount, as well as on countywide races and issues appearing on Bainbridge ballots, Flynn said.

The machine, called an optical scan ballot tabulator, is one of three at Givens Community Center. A stack of ballots is placed in a hopper on the machine and the ballots are fed through, one at a time. Two stuck together or one going in crooked is enough to cause a jam, Flynn said.

It's an occasional problem, apparently.

"It's not unusual," Flynn said.

Election workers dealing with the jam attempted to cancel the count on the affected batch of ballots.

"It wasn't successful," Flynn said.

Ballots from the primary election still are being counted and certification is set for Friday.

In the Bainbridge mayoral race as of late Wednesday, incumbent Darlene Kordonowy had 4,713 votes for 52.83 percent of the vote; Nezam Tooloee had 2,301 votes for 25.79 percent; Will Peddy had 1,041 votes for 11.67 percent and Michael Berry had 810 votes, for 9.08 percent.