State orders review after Mahoning County's ballot-counting error

YOUNGSTOWN

After a mistake led to the double counting of more than 6,000 early-vote ballots, the Ohio secretary of state is ordering the Mahoning County Board of Elections to “conduct a formal internal review” of what went wrong.

The mistake was made in the board’s “final unofficial” results distributed to the media and others on election night, Nov. 7.

In a Wednesday letter to the board members, Secretary of State Jon Husted wrote the report “must document how the tabulation error occurred and what steps the board plans to implement to ensure that a similar error is not repeated and that the media and the public are notified of any amended unofficial election results.”

Husted wrote in the letter that he wants a draft report no later than 5 p.m. Nov. 28.

Mark Munroe, Mahoning elections board director, said the request is appropriate, and the board will take a number of steps to make sure the problem doesn’t occur again.

Deputy Director Thomas McCabe said he failed to reset a scanner that had counted early-vote paper ballots before he inserted 18 ballots that were voted curbside at polling locations.

That resulted in 6,161 early-vote ballots being counted twice on the “final unofficial” report that the board ran at 10:27 p.m. election night.

Read more about the matter in Thurtsday's Vindicator or on Vindy.com.