Warren workers tired, go home without count

The Warren County Board of Elections is shutting down for the night without counting about 2,000 mail-in and absentee ballots.

The four-person board voted unanimously to leave without completing the tallies, leaving some issues like the King Schools levy in the balance. The leftover ballots will be tallied when the official count is completed Nov. 21, said Susan Johnson, director of the board of elections. Johnson said the workers were tired.

"We don't want to stay here another six hours to count them," she said.

Chris Gaffney, Warren County Democratic Party Chair, said there were no local races that looked like they would be affected by the remaining ballots.

"I have no issues with what they decided. I trust the people in there," Gaffney said.

Kings schools officials would disagree.

With 98 percent of the voted counted Kings’ $27.2 million bond issue was losing by 216 votes – 52 percent against and 48 percent for the property tax increase.

“It’s disappointing,” said Kings Superintendent Charles Mason when he learned of election officials' decision late Tuesday evening.

He declined further comment.

But earlier in the day Mason tried to vote in his South Lebanon precinct and was handed the wrong ballot – one without the Kings school issue.

“I live in South Lebanon and the precinct is split with some of the homes in Kings school system and others in Little Miami schools. The poll workers were supposed to give me the right ballot but they didn’t,” said Mason. “The poll workers are supposed to know what they are doing.

“It should never happen, especially in an election as important as this one. Even those who oppose our bond issue need to be able to vote on it,” he said.

Kings school officials e-mailed a notice Tuesday afternoon to school parents alerting those that vote at split precincts to make sure they receive the proper ballot if they live within the Warren County school system.

But Johnson said at the time that the problem only affected “a couple of people at one precinct early today and the problem was caught and corrected early.”

Warren County officials said earlier in the evening that they were experiencing difficulty scanning in absentee and mailed in ballots.

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

The scanning machines had 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 had to feed them individually. In some cases, election workers transcribed votes to fresh ballots when individual ballots would not scan correctly. Gully did not know how many had to be transcribed.

-- reporting by Jennifer Mrozowski, Jacob Dirr and Michael Clark