Warren struggles with absentee ballots

Jacob Dirr reporting:

Warren County officials are experiencing difficulty scanning in absentee and mailed in ballots, Warren County Administrator David Gully said.

Warren County received about 10,000 mail-in ballots this year, which are “way more” than past elections, Gully said.

The scanning machines are having trouble reading ballots that were crumpled or wrinkled in the mail-in process, Gully said. Although the machines are designed to be fed several hundred ballots at a time, election workers here have to feed them individually, Gully said.

In some cases, election workers are transcribing votes to fresh ballots when individual ballots are not scanning correctly, Gully said.

Gully did not know how many had to be transcribed. Gully said the machines, made by Election Systems & Software, cost $45,000.

There are two people scanning them into machines, from my observation point. Then there are two ladies sitting at a desk, who are handed ballots to be transcribed.

Barbara Sizemore, Warren County Board of Elections board member said there is one Republican and one Democrat. One person calls the votes aloud, while the other marks it, Sizemore said. Sizemore said they were being monitored.