Tooele, Washington counties face adjudicated ballot issue in recount of Congressional District 2 GOP primary

TOOELE — Tooele and Washington counties have discovered an issue with the recount in the race for Utah’s 2nd Congressional District that has netted some extra votes for Colby Jenkins in Tooele, though it’s not likely to overturn the overall results.

Tooele election officials said 55 votes in the Congressional District race weren’t tallied in their initial GOP primary totals in the razor-thin race won by Rep. Celeste Maloy. Of those votes, Jenkins earned 37 and Maloy netted 18.

That’s not enough to overturn the results; Maloy beat Jenkins by 214 votes. And Washington County is currently double checking its totals.

Tooele County Clerk Tracy Shaw says the issue has to do with adjudicated ballots — those are ballots that can’t be read by tabulating machines, usually because a bubble for a race isn’t filled in correctly. Two bubbles filled in in the same race are called over-votes. Those ballots then get looked at to determine the voter’s intent.

Election workers were able to determine the correct vote for those 55 ballots, but Shaw said their election tabulation system wasn’t applying the changes to vote totals.

“We went to apply the changes and the software just didn’t spit them out into the reports accurately. But the hand count helped us to identify that and we were able to resolve it with our election vendor,” she said.

How it was discovered

Shaw said they first discovered the issue after recount tallies didn’t match the initial results.

“We noticed a problem when we first polled results. We had a discrepancy, a very small discrepancy with our initial poll. And that didn’t match our our canvass the first time. And so that was when we started investigating and we postponed our canvass to address those concerns.”

Shaw said they reviewed each adjudicated ballot to determine if a human had perhaps entered the wrong vote.

“We found zero errors,” she said.

Nine counties in the 2nd Congressional District GOP race report recount numbers

That’s when they decided to do a hand recount of adjudicated ballots.

“And that paper hand count that we did initially signaled that there were even more problems than we think, that those numbers didn’t match up either. And so that’s when our election vendor got involved and we started alerting them that, you know, first of all, we had discrepancies and now we can’t find the error. So there’s something going on in the tabulation on the back end.”

Tooele County and 26 other counties in Utah use a well-known, nationwide election administration company called Election Systems & Software, also known as ES&S.

“Luckily for me and my staff, our election vendor was able to identify a problem and in the back end … we were able to alert that there’s a problem here with the adjudications,” Shaw said. “The system indicated that the (overvotes) were being applied — those changes that we made with those ballots — but those changes weren’t reaching the reports.”

The Lt. Gov.’s Deidre Henderson’s office issued a statement saying Washington County is also checking their adjudicated ballots.

“At this time, Washington County is the only other county known to have experienced this issue,” it reads.

#NEW: @LGHendersonUtah reports Tooele had an issue with adjudicated ballots in the Congressional District 2 recount and both they and Washington county are double checking their totals, delaying certification.

Adjudicated ballots are those that scanning machines can’t determine… pic.twitter.com/08rNTgh4Uk

— Lindsay Aerts (@LindsayOnAir) August 2, 2024

The office says they’re verifying that no other counties had this issue. Tooele has now certified its recounted results, Washington County has delayed its recount canvass until Monday, citing the same issue.

“Specifically, an error message was received that the adjudicated ballots were not reflected in the total results. In an abundance of caution, our office is going to review all adjudicated ballots,” the statement read.

ES&S responded in a press release, stating the voting error occurred due to “incomplete or stray marks by the voter” when election officials recounted the votes in the reporting module.

“Upon inspection of the election database, it was confirmed that the adjudicated ballots were correctly counted and recorded; however, had not successfully saved to the reporting module,” the ES&S press release stated. “The issue was corrected by identifying the adjudicated ballots that did not save properly, clearing out those ballots, and re-loading them in smaller batches, resulting in accurate and reliable results.”

The recount is expected to be final on Monday.