MULLICA TOWNSHIP — A recount of the Township Committee race found 11 mail-in votes missed by the electronic counting machine, but the new total still leaves Democratic incumbent Barbara Rheault behind her challenger by one vote, Rheault said Friday.
The missing votes garnered four
more for Rheault and four for GOP challenger John Walther, with the
remaining three going to others.
“The original process is a machine count. The recount is a hand count,” she said. “That’s how we caught the 11 votes.”
Machine recounts found no issues,
although one person who thought they had voted had never hit the button
to register the vote, Rheault said.
The election was certified Nov.
13 by the Atlantic County Clerk’s Office, at which point the vote
tallies were 614 for Rheault and 615 for Walther. They would stand at
618 for Rheault and 619 for Walther with the newly discovered votes.
But Rheault isn't ready to concede.
She and her attorney Bard Shober
are looking at mail-in votes in Hammonton and Egg Harbor City to see if
votes of Mullica residents with mailing addresses in those neighboring
towns were rejected and never sent on to Mullica.
Since Mullica doesn’t have its
own ZIP code, other than for post office boxes in the Elwood section
post office, she is concerned Mullica votes by mail may have been sent
to the wrong place and never made it to the right one.
“I will be OK with losing by one vote, if that is the way people really voted,” she said.
But a problems with provisional
votes not being delivered that day resulted in at least one of her
supporters not being able to vote, she said.
“With all our technology, we’re still messing up elections,” said Rheault.
She said if she and Shober find
that some mail-in ballots never made it to Mullica, and would have
resulted in her winning, she will contest the election.
No taxpayer money is paying for
the recount, she said. She and her party are funding it, and it has so
far cost about $300 in fees.
Contact: 609-272-7219
Twitter @MichelleBPost
http://www.pressofatlanticcity.com/news/breaking/mullica-candidates-still-one-vote-apart-after-recount-finds-new/article_90aad5ac-9543-11e5-9225-5bd9e536f252.html
12/6/15 Press Editorial
http://gadfly01.blogspot.com/2015/12/press-editorial-inexcusable-ballot.html
Related posts
http://gadfly01.blogspot.com/2015/11/mullica-election-finally-decided.html
6 comments:
I have suddenly lost all confidence in mail-in voting! ELEVEN missed. WOW !!
If the denied Provisional vote is proven and nothing else is found, I think the County should pay for a whole new election for Mullica. They messed up not having Provisional ballots at the polls and disenfranchised voters.
I agree. These mail-in ballots are out of control.The mail in ballots are easily manipulated.There are way to many mail in ballots in some areas. People should be encouraged to vote every election at the polling places established.
The eleven votes were just over 10% of the vote-by-mail ballots that were cast. Most disheartening was hearing a member of the Board of Elections state that they were aware of the "problem" with the machine that scans the mail ballots - and that they would be having a presentation and demonstration of a new machine during the next few weeks.
Who is paying the hourly employees to do the recount? The taxpayers. $300 hardly covers it.
It's been all over the internet & tv for years about how easy it is to hack electronic voting machines to flip votes and now the mail-in scanners have "problems".
It is a total disgrace that our Atlantic County election officials knew about the faulty machine and did nothing about it. Harry Hurley wrote an article about how the bigger city mail-in votes were way out of sync this election. He's going to investigate. Maybe the feds should come and investigate N.J.'s elections.
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