A hand count of ballots cast during the November election is nearly complete, weeks sooner than first thought.
Former Secretary of State Wayne Williams, who was hired to oversee the fall election in Mesa County when Clerk Tina Peters was barred from doing so, said that was possible because of the number of people who signed up to do the count — they are being paid $12.32 an hour to do so — and the use of two-person teams instead of four.
As a result, by the end of Wednesday those teams had counted nearly 430,000 ballots, with about 87,000 to be finished by today.
“Originally we were thinking we were going to do teams of four with one person calling (votes), one person watches the caller and two people tally to see if they balance,” Williams said. “Instead, we switched to two-person teams with one person calling and the other tallying.”
Those teams, made up of judges from opposing political parties, would review ballots in batches of about 100, and then match their count with the official tally that has already been done with election machine tabulators.
Doing it that way — there are 48 teams — has allowed the count to go faster than the original three-week time frame Williams and others had expected.
As a result, the final results are expected to be done by early next week.
The effort also drew help from clerks and election workers in other counties, such as Fremont, Chaffee and Saguache.
The count was mandated by the Mesa County Board of Commissioners as a way to show the county’s election equipment accurately tabulated the vote, and so far it has been spot on, Williams said.
“There have been no significant discrepancies, and the teams have worked well together,” Williams said.
The commissioners also ordered that the county will tabulate the ballots a third time, but with tabulation machines made by Clear Ballot, which only two Colorado counties use. Mesa County, like 61 others in the state, use Dominion Voting System machines.
The county also plans to post all the ballot online for anyone to do their own count if they choose.
"complete" - Google News
December 02, 2021 at 02:15PM
https://ift.tt/3lvfPzf
Hand count of ballots nearly complete - The Grand Junction Daily Sentinel
"complete" - Google News
https://ift.tt/2Fvz4Dj
https://ift.tt/2YviVIP
No comments:
Post a Comment