Board completes official vote tally

More than 1,000 people didn't vote in the 6th Congressional seat race.
By D.A. WILKINSON
VINDICATOR SALEM BUREAU
LISBON -- The winners and losers in the May primary didn't change after the official count.
The Columbiana County Board of Elections certified the results Friday.
The county sales tax, the issue for a new Leetonia library and a renewal of an operating levy in New Waterford were defeated.
The county mental health replacement levy, Salem's bid to negotiate for lower utility rates, the new Salem school levy, and Perry Township police levy renewal all passed.
New Waterford had appeared to qualify for an automatic recount under the unofficial election night numbers, but it didn't under the official count.
Charlie Wilson still won in the county as the Democratic write-in candidate for the 6th District congressional seat after his campaign failed to get enough valid signatures to appear on the ballot. Wilson apparently gathered enough write-in votes throughout to win in the district.
Wilson received 6,600 votes in Columbiana County, while fellow Democrats Bob Carr and John Luchansky received 2,719 and 1,242 votes, respectively.
But some 1,040 voters apparently didn't like any of the candidates and did not cast a vote in the race. An additional 36 people voted twice in that contest, which nullified their vote.
Historic election
John Payne, deputy director of the elections board, and a historian, said Wilson's write-in votes -- and the number of those who didn't vote in the contest -- were likely the largest of their kind in the county's history.
The primary was the first election in the county's history that used electric devices to scan the ballots. Elections officials said they had no problems with the equipment.
Lois Gall, elections board director, said that more poll worker training was needed. Despite training before the election, some workers had problems setting up or taking down the scanners.
The problems did not affect voting. The system is designed so that if the power and the scanner's backup battery fails, the paper ballots cast by voters can be stored and counted later.
Counting on election night was held up, in part, when a Perry Township precinct did not get its ballots to Lisbon for three hours and 15 minutes after the polls closed. Payne said that the poll workers made a clerical error, so their records of the number of ballots that had been issued was two less than the number of ballots cast. Payne said the workers hadn't been able to reconcile the numbers.
Counting on election night also was slowed because of confusion between the elections board and the Ohio Secretary of State's office over whether absentee votes had to be counted. The elections board didn't plan to count the votes on election night, but the state said they had been told to. The county had 1,303 absentee ballots, and 158 walk-in votes on election day.
wilkinson@vindy.com