Of the 187 provisional ballots that Brown County residents cast in the 2020 general election, 96 were allowed to count.
Provisional ballots are offered to voters if there’s some question about their eligibility to vote in that election or at the poll where they are trying to vote.
After each election, the Brown County Election Board examines each provisional ballot individually — along with the reasons poll workers give for why they gave that voter a provisional ballot and not a regular ballot — and the board decides, according to the law, which provisional ballots should count and which cannot.
That meeting happened on Nov. 13 at the library, and it took nearly four hours to get through all of them.
The board had never seen this many provisional ballots from one election.
But in general, this election also brought near-record percentages of eligible voters out to participate, so seeing more provisionals was somewhat expected.
“With the interest in this election … people were just, like, coming out of the woodwork, literally,” said election board member Amy Kelso.
“We kept saying in training, ‘Don’t turn a voter away. Everybody votes,’” said Brown County Clerk Kathy Smith. However, provisional ballots are always held back and not counted with the other votes on election day so that the election board can first make sure that those people had the right to vote.
Smith originally told the election board that there were 209 provisional ballots to review, but after the ballots were actually inspected, there were only 187. She said she and her deputy must have miscounted the stack the first time, as some of the ballot envelopes were folded.
The majority of the votes that were not counted — 37 of them — were because the voter could not be found in the Statewide Voter Registration System (SVRS) as a properly registered voter in Brown County.
One other voter was in the process of moving, got confused, and cast ballots in both counties, Smith said. The Brown County and Johnson County clerk’s offices talked to each other about this voter and Johnson County claimed him, so his Brown County ballot was rejected.
Two others were rejected because the voters admitted they did not live in Brown County, but chose to try to vote here anyway.
One other person filled out an absentee voter application for Brown County and then received a ballot, but was not a registered voter here. Smith could not explain how that happened. That ballot also was rejected.
Two ballots were not counted because the voters had been “canceled” in the SVRS, one in August 2019 and the other in 2013. It’s unclear how or why they were canceled.
The most frequent reason for provisional ballots being rejected, besides voters not being properly registered, was trouble with signatures.
Provisional voters have to sign an envelope that contains their ballot, then that signature is compared against the signature on their voter registration and/or driver’s license. For 16 voters, there was either no second signature to compare to or the board couldn’t read it, so those ballots could not be counted. Several of those voters were contacted to try to fix their signature problems, but they did not respond, Smith said.
One voter was in the process of being switched between hospitals, so his family faxed his ballot in, but without the required ID, Smith explained. However, a paper ballot for this person also was in the stack of provisional ballots, but was not folded in such a way that it could have fit in the provisional ballot envelope. The board did not count this person’s votes.
Another ballot was rejected because the voter tried to return his mail-in ballot on election day at his regular polling place, but there was a long line and he didn’t want to wait, so he handed it to a poll worker, said Diana Biddle, who was working at that polling place. However, the voter’s ID was not checked at that time, so it couldn’t count. “We were swamped,” Biddle explained. They had no way of knowing without checking the voter’s ID into the SVRS whether that person had already voted another ballot, so to be safe, they treated it like a provisional, she said.
One voter accidentally gave her paycheck to poll workers on election day in the mail-in ballot envelope, along with a blank ballot and an “I voted” sticker. Board member Mark Williams called her during the meeting to let her know where she could find her check. Since that ballot was incomplete, it didn’t count.
A group of nine provisional ballots, all from Van Buren Township and cast on election day, had to be rejected because the poll workers had clipped them all together instead of putting each in a separate envelope with the voter’s name on it and a reason why they had to vote provisional. There were also only six slips with voters’ names on them clipped to that batch of nine ballots, so it was unclear where the three other ballots had come from, or which of the six was from which voter.
Because of the way these were handled at the polls, the board could decide if any of them were eligible voters or which votes were theirs, so none of them could count.
Sixteen voters went to the wrong polling place to try to vote on election day, so poll workers correctly gave them provisional ballots. Normally, if you go to the wrong polling place, your ballot will not count. But because this time, there were no precinct- or township-specific offices on the ballot, all those ballots that were cast in the wrong precinct could be counted, since those voters were all properly registered to vote in Brown County.
“A lot of grace is being given in this election,” Williams said.
The 96 new votes did not change the outcome of any race.
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After 96 provisional ballots were counted on Nov. 13, here are the new vote totals for Brown County:
PRESIDENT AND VP: Trump/Pence (R) 5,777; Biden/Harris (D) 3,036; Jorgensen/Cohen (L) 168
GOVERNOR AND LT. GOV.: Holcomb/Crouch (R) 4,953; Myers/Lawson (D) 2,381; Rainwater/Henry (L) 1,623
ATTORNEY GENERAL: Todd Rokita (R) 5,625; Jonathan Weinzapfel (D) 3,141
U.S. REP. DIST. 9: Trey Hollingsworth (R) 5,643; Andy Ruff (D) 2,831; Tonya Millis (L) 391
STATE SEN. DIST. 44: Eric Koch (R) 5,954; Cinde Wirth (D) 2,866
STATE REP. DIST. 65: Chris May (R) 5,788; Paula Staley (D) 2,956
COUNTY RECORDER: Mary Smith (R) 6,888
COUNTY TREASURER: Andy Bond (R) 6,896
COUNTY SURVEYOR: David Harden (D) 5,588
COUNTY COMMISSIONER DIST. 1: Chuck Braden (R) 5,567; Tracey Burnett 3,054
COUNTY COMMISSIONER DIST. 3: Jerry Pittman (R) 5,483; Ron Fleetwood 3,218
COUNTY COUNCIL AT LARGE (three elected): David Critser (R) 4,214; Scott Rudd (R) 4,291; Judy Swift-Powdrill (R) 3,993; Ken Birkemeier (D) 2,608; Kevin Fleming (D) 2,045; Melissa Parker (D) 2,206
SCHOOL BOARD AT LARGE (two elected): Marlene Barnett 1,267; Stephanie Kritzer 2,753; Linda Hobbs 1,660; Lance Miller 1,800; Amy Oliver 2,807
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