Supervisors Canvass Votes and talk about Results

Tuesday the Henry County Board of Supervisors canvassed the June 2 primary vote.  There were no problems with the final numbers and no changes in the results.  Commissioner of Elections Shelly Barber said 940 people voted at the polls on June 2. And 2,750 voted absentee for a total of 3,690 people who voted.  There are 8,052 registered voters in the county so that makes for a 45.83 percent voter turnout and the highest turnout for a Henry County primary election.  The large absentee numbers all across the state can be directly attributed to Secretary of State Paul Pate’s effort to send all registered voters early ballot request forms.  The Iowa House has passed a bill that would not allow Pate to do this ahead of the November General election. No word yet on the Senate outcome. There was discussion at the supervisor’s meeting regarding the initial results from the Republican supervisors race. At first it was determined there would have to be a county convention to decide a second nominee. However, Barber discovered the law has changed since the last time this situation occurred in 1996. She explained again that the calculation is Total votes cast 4,507 divided by 2 seats = 2,254 times 35% which is 789 votes.  Therefore Chad White and Greg Moeller won the Nomination for the General and there will be no county convention to decide. She also said at Tuesday’s meeting that her contact in the Secretary of State’s office did not know when that law changed.  There was a second discussion regarding the time it took for the absentee votes to be totaled.  Barber is in contact with the company that the voting equipment was purchased from and that provides technical support.  A problem occurred election night that caused the machine the absentee ballots were fed into to take nearly two hours to calculate the data and turn out the totals.  The company still has not provided an explanation for the glitch but thought it had to do with a software update that was done before the primary.  Barber said her office did a test run and had no problem at that time.  Concern was expressed about this happening on general election night.  Barber said she is working to make sure it doesn’t happen again.