MOUNT VERNON — Of the 41,428 registered voters in Knox County, 10,018 cast a ballot in the Nov. 4 General Election.
The 24.18 percent turnout is higher than the 18% to 20% Board of Elections Director James Blazer anticipated.
“There were lots of things going on in the southwest part of the county that caused a lot of turnout,” Blazer said. “There was a liquor option, there were other levies, there was the fire levy, council, and township trustees, so all that was going on.”
Blazer said voter turnout is “kind of a moving target” because of provisional ballots.
“As those come in, we’ll change those percentages,” he said.
Citizens typically vote provisionally because of a misspelled name, incorrect address, or some other discrepancy. They have until Saturday to come to the BOE and correct, or “cure,” the information.
The elections office, located at 104 E. Sugar St., is open until 5 p.m. through Friday. It will also be open Saturday.
Election Day proceeded without glitches or the need to deploy the BOE’s VOTER vehicle, a mobile voting unit that can respond to any precinct if a problem occurs.
“It sat there fully diesled up, and it did exactly what we wanted it to do. We didn’t want to have to deploy it,” Blazer said.
The BOE will return the van to the Veterans Services Office.
“We appreciate their help; we couldn’t have done it without them. The odds of having to use it is going to be rare, but our job is to be prepared for all contingencies,” Blazer said.
“It’s kind of like what I said, if we do our job, nobody notices that we’ve done it.”
Auditing an election
The elections board will meet on Friday, Nov. 14, to approve provisional ballots.
Friday, Nov. 21, is the board’s monthly meeting, which will include certifying election results.
Blazer scheduled Friday, Dec. 5, as the date the board will audit the races.
“The audit’s going to probably be an interesting one, because I would assume we’re going to audit some of the write-in races,” Blazer said. “There were thousands of write-in ballots; that’s what took so long for us to come forward with the results (Tuesday) night.”
Working in pairs, a Republican and a Democrat examine each write-in vote on a computer screen and then assign the vote to a candidate.
If they are unable to determine who the voter intended to vote for, the ballot is invalid.
“Last night we had mixtures of the names. They had the first name of one candidate and the last name of another candidate,” Blazer explained.
“So who gets the vote, right? That stops that whole process, and then there’s a discussion, and ultimately, when you do something like that, it can exclude the vote because we can’t tell what their intent was. Things like that slows down that whole process.”
What triggers an election recount?
If a recount is needed, the board will meet again on Nov. 24.
According to Section 3515.011 of the Ohio Revised Code, the BOE will conduct an automatic recount if the margin is less than one-half of 1%.
Otherwise, if a candidate or organization asks for a recount, they will have to pay for the process.
Below is a link to final unofficial election results.
