43
Officials plan count of 147 misplaced Struthers write-in ballots
STRUTHERS
The Mahoning County Board of Elections will open 147 uncounted write-in ballots Saturday in the Struthers mayoral race that election officials say were misplaced on Election Night. But the results of that race and others in the county won’t be finalized until Nov. 20.
It’s all but certain that Mayor Terry Stocker, who ran for re-election as a write-in and currently trails Democrat Danny Thomas Jr. by 72 votes, will be the winner when all of the votes are counted, elections officials say.
“I don’t think [Stocker] has anything to worry about,” said Joyce Kale-Pesta, the county elections director.
Starting at 10 a.m. Saturday, the ballots will be taken from a box that was sealed at its polling location and transported to the elections board. They will then be run through a scanner to verify that there are 147, and counted by hand by election workers to determine how many are valid votes for Stocker, Kale-Pesta said.
Stocker and Thomas, and their representatives, among others, will witness the hand-count, Kale-Pesta said.
The board of elections will meet at 5 p.m. Nov. 20 to certify the results of the Struthers mayor’s race and everything else on the ballot. That will include about 50 provisional ballots in the Struthers mayor’s race.
On the night of the Nov. 3 election, the box containing paper ballots with 147 write-in votes from Struthers Precincts 3A and 3C was unloaded from an elections board truck, she said. But instead of being separated so those votes could be counted with other write-in votes in Struthers, it was accidently placed on a bin with other ballot boxes off that truck that came from Campbell, Lowellville, Coitsville and Poland township, and placed in a vault, Kale-Pesta said.
The seven other Struthers ballot boxes went to the correct location and were counted, Kale-Pesta said.
The ballots in the missing box would have eventually been discovered during the board’s count of votes, she said.
By state law, that count cannot commence until Saturday, but the local board usually waits a few more days before it starts that process.
Because of the problem with the uncounted 147 write-in ballots, the board is doing the hand-count Saturday for those write-in votes, Kale-Pesta said.
The issue was discovered after Stocker asked the board to check for missing ballots as it initially looked like the mayor had won based on early-voting totals and the number of write-in ballots listed at the city’s polling locations. Even Thomas said on election night that he estimated he was defeated by 91 votes. But later that night, the board counted what it believed was all the votes with Thomas ahead by 72.