The winners of Brown County elections did not change after today’s review of 138 ballots, but one race did end in a tie.

For Washington 2 precinct committeeman, Republicans Michael J. Magner and Larry Voris both ended up with 73 votes each. In that case, Republican Party Chairman Mark Bowman said he had the right to pick the winner. He chose Magner because he said he was more supportive of the party and local party leadership.

Magner and Voris had been separated by one vote, with Magner ahead, when unofficial election results were released on June 2.

This afternoon, the Brown County Election Board reviewed 138 ballots that had not been counted earlier for various reasons.

Sixteen of them were provisional ballots, which are given to a voter if there’s some question about their right to vote in this county or in the precinct they go to on election day.

The other ballots, 122 mail-ins, had been set aside on election day after election board members Amy Kelso and Mark Williams found initials that did not appear to be those of election board members or their proxies on the back of the ballots, but were made to look like their initials.

Who made those initials and why is under investigation, and those ballots have been in the custody of law enforcement since June 2.

On Tuesday, the election board voted 3-0, including member and county clerk Kathy Smith, to go ahead and count those 122 ballots because they did not believe that the voters were involved in those initials being made, and they appeared to be otherwise valid ballots.

Of those 122 set-aside ballots, 89 (73 percent) were Democrat ballots and 33 (27 percent) were Republican ballots.

Overall, more Democrats than Republicans voted early by mail or walk-in in Brown County’s primary, 761 Dems (54.6 percent) vs. 634 GOP (45.4 percent). But in total, more Brown County voters pulled Republican ballots (58.7 percent) than Democrat ballots (41.3 percent).

After today’s count, no other races ended any differently than was announced on election day.

Most of the votes on the set-aside ballots mirrored what Brown County votes as a whole looked like. For each candidate, all vote total percentages from the group of 122 were within about 10 percent of the percentages on the earlier countywide report, except for races that had fewer than five new ballots to count.

Of the 16 provisional ballots, five were cast during the early absentee voting period and the rest were from election day. The board decided to count four of the absentee provisional ballots and four of the election day provisional ballots.

None of the four election day provisional ballots were initialed by the poll clerks on duty, as they were required to do, but election board members Williams, Smith and proxy Michael Fulton decided to accept them anyway to honor the voters’ intent.

The election board rejected six other provisional ballots because the voters were not registered in Brown County at the time of the election. Two provisionals from Van Buren were rejected because there were no actual ballots in the envelope, just slips of paper.

The election board did not vote to certify the election results today, but would do so at the next meeting, Smith said. She said she would support that vote. Results were due to the state today by 3 p.m.

At Tuesday’s election board meeting, Kelso and Williams had questioned whether or not Smith would vote to certify the results after they said they’d heard her make that threat on more than one occasion.

Brown County’s election results will be audited.

Williams announced at this afternoon’s meeting that Brown County had been accepted as a pilot county to receive a risk-limiting audit, at the election board’s request. The audit will occur sometime between the closing of the primary election process and the middle of July, he said.

The voting machines that Brown County voters used provide a VVPAT, or voter-verifiable paper audit trail. In a risk-limiting audit, a statistical sample of ballots or audit trails is examined manually and compared against the electronic results.

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