The Brown County Election Board convened for its first meeting of the year last week, where they set the 2023 meeting schedule and continued to discuss matters from the 2022 general election.
One such matter was the recount of the Dist. 62 state representative seat, which concluded Dec. 20 — with about 20 Brown County ballots missing from the final tabulation.
According to the Indiana State Board of Accounts Recount Commission, 261 ballots were “misplaced” in Brown County, which was one of three counties involved in the recount.
Most ballots, according to a letter from SBOA State Examiner Paul Joyce, were located later, except for 17 ballots never located in Van Buren precinct and three ballots never located in Washington 1.
Ten ballots outside of those precincts that were not previously reported were also found during the recount.
“After much diligence, the State Board of Accounts was unable to locate every ballot reported cast in the district,” Joyce’s letter states.
“Although we were not able to make a determination on the ballots unable to be located, we did tally all located ballots, including ballots not previously reported by the counties.”
The recount commission performed a manual hand count in Brown and Monroe counties, as requested by the Monroe County Democratic Party.
On Nov. 29 two Indiana State Police detectives visited the Brown County Law Enforcement Center to secure all election materials used in the general election, for a recount of the District 62 state house race, which was separated by only 40 votes.
Across the whole district, Republican Dave Hall received 12,990 votes with Democrat Penny Githens close behind with 12,950, according to the Nov. 29 count from the Office of the Secretary of State.
Hall originally was declared the winner by more than 1,000 votes before about 6,600 early voting ballots that had not yet been counted were added to the total.
In Brown County, Hall and Githens were separated by more than 2,000 votes: Hall accrued 4,204 and Githens received 2,189.
By the end of the recount, Hall had 4,214 and Githens had 2,189 votes.
Hall finished with 13,037 votes throughout the district and Githens had 12,963.
The seat represents all of Brown County, and some of Jackson and Monroe counties.
Kevin Fleming, the Democrat representative on the election board, said at the Jan. 10 meeting that it seemed that the answers as to where missing ballots could have been would be in the Brown County Clerk’s office, but election board chair Mark Williams said that was not the case since ballots have been in the hands of ISP since November.
Williams said that absentee ballots were inserted through the vote count machine in batches of 50 by precinct, then were cleared from the machine and placed in bags that were marked by precinct.
When those bags became full, Williams said, they were zipped and sealed, taken back and put in a vault in County Office Building.
The week following Election Day, items in that vault were gathered and moved by Fleming and Williams to the Brown County Law Enforcement Center, to a secured area in the basement.
“There were no ballots that were ‘laying around’ when we cleared the room and made room for the (county clerk) to come in (on election night),” Williams said last week.
At the LEC the election board, including former clerk Kathy Smith, took documents unloaded ballot bags out of two wagons used for transportation into two bins in the locked cage.
Williams said after they were unloaded he asked Fleming and Smith if there was anything else in the at the bottom of transportation bins, and both said no.
They locked the cage and no one else had access to the keys, until Indiana State Troopers took keys at the time of the recount. They still have exclusive possession and access to election storage.
When the recount took place at the jail, Williams said he heard the recount commission could not find 300 ballots and he remembered those ballot bags and that they were full.
“They couldn’t be missing because I put the ballots in the bags and they were full,” he said last week.
He said he drove to the jail during the recount and told the recount commission to look in the bottom of the bin and that they would find what they were looking for. There they found three bags.
Williams said someone with SBOA told him they had what they needed.
Fleming said on Jan. 10 that a determination missing ballots could come from comparing vote tabulation to physical ballots found.
“We should try to obtain detailed report of the recount. If we don’t have all those totals, it’s hard for us to figure out what we did wrong and what we need to do differently,” he said at the meeting.
Some Brown County ballots, according to the election board, were also missing signatures of poll clerks.
According to state statute, a ballot cast on Election Day — regardless of whether or not it’s been signed by poll clerks —will be added to the total in the event of a recount.
If the ballot does not bear two sets of initials and is either mailed in or cast early it may not be counted in recount.
“The lesson learned there is for (the county) clerk to build the absentee voter process in a way that there is a failsafe to assure that all of the required initials replaced on every ballot all the time,” Williams said at the Jan. 10 meeting.
“(There) has to be a final inspection, someone assigned to inspect the back of the ballot for initials before it’s delivered to voter or before it’s placed into envelope and placed in the mail.”
Not only is it unknown why ballots would be missing, Williams said, it’s unclear where the ballots are missing from based on information from SBOA.
Williams after the meeting last week that the election board had a “very deliberate” process on Election Day.
At this time, there are no “next steps” for the election board, Williams said, but he suspects the board will receive a report from the recount commission addressed specifically to the election board.
“I don’t really know what the process will be now, we haven’t received any communication at all,” he said.
“I really don’t know whether the ballots they say are missing are absentee or if they were apparently from Election Day. I don’t know how they determined that there were ballots missing.”
He said that they could speculate based on how many ballots were given out, how many voters signed poll book, how many ballots the county tabulated, but they don’t yet know for certain.
“Mr. Fleming and I are most interested in the report from the recount commission and SBOA and if there are gaps in our processes of storage, we will most certainly correct those gaps,” Williams said.
CLARIFICATION, JAN. 27:
In the story featured in the Jan. 18 Democrat about the general election recount, it was reported that Brown County Election Board Democrat representative Kevin Fleming said that the answer to vote count irregularities should be in the Brown County Clerk’s Office.
It was reported that election board chair Mark Williams’ response was that the misplaced ballots could not have been in the clerk’s office.
Fleming elaborated that he was referring to the documentation completed by each precinct on election night which included a reconciliation of ballots issued to each and that documentation would provide information about accounting for all of the ballots.
Fleming did not suggest there were issued ballots in the clerk’s office.
