Commissioner Cynthia Long has asked Williamson County’s top election official to come up with a plan for counting the early votes on a precinct-by-precinct level for a second time since the Nov. 3 election.
Elections Administrator Chris Davis presented the results of the first count of the early voting by precinct to commissioners on Tuesday. He said he could not say how accurate the results were because 235,000 early votes had to be sorted manually into 94 precincts to meet a state deadline of Nov. 16.
The precinct-by-precinct count does not affect the race outcomes for candidates, he said, but provides political parties and candidates data to show how they fared in each precinct. The votes in question had already been counted to help determine the winners of the races.
The county’s election office had to count the early voting ballots for precinct results by hand because a bar code that would have sorted them by each of the county’s 94 precincts was not on the ballots.
The error, which Davis said was caused by the county’s vendor, was discovered and fixed before votes were cast on Election Day.
Davis said as many as 12 people had to sort the affected early voting ballots by hand in six days. Some of the ballots could have been assigned to the wrong precinct because of human error, he said.
Commissioner Cynthia Long on Tuesday said she wanted to find out if the precinct count for early voting could be redone.
“My concern is we do whatever it takes to get to a level of accuracy with the manual process and perhaps redo it,” she said.
Davis said the second recount of the early votes by precinct level would also have to be done by hand.
Long asked Davis to return to the Commissioners Court with details on what it would take to do that.
County Judge Bill Gravell said he was going to ask the county’s election vendor to cover the cost of counting the early votes by precinct for a second time.
“It wasn’t a mistake we made,” said Gravell. “It was a mistake the vendor made and we are going to get the right data,” he said.
The commissioners voted 4-1 on Tuesday to accept the results from Davis of the total number of votes cast for each candidate. It was not related to how many votes candidates received by precinct.
Long voted against accepting the vote totals for the entire election.
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