Large size, number of ballots slow down absentee voting count in Cape County

Absentee ballots in Cape Girardeau County took longer than usual to count on election night, though County Clerk Kara Clark Summers said this was in part because of the sheer volume of them.

The county received 15,691 early or absentee ballots out of 40,762 total ballots cast. Tuesday, Nov. 5, was the first presidential election since the State of Missouri allowed no-excuse absentee voting.

Complications arose at one of the county’s two absentee voting locations. Summers’ office uses the Unisyn OpenElect 2.2 Freedom Vote Scanner system for counting absentee ballots that ordinarily have the memory to count 5,000 ballots.

However, once a machine hits 4,500 ballots this election, it will stop accepting more ballots to upload. Every time she and her staff tried to input additional ballots, they received an error message.

“(Tuesday) night, when we went to upload the results, the one machine did fine because it wasn’t maxed out, but the other machine’s memory was maxed out so it wouldn’t take nothing else, not even the upload,” Summers said. “… Normally, we would have one machine going and it would cover all of our in-person absentees because we never have that many in-person.”

These were 17-inch-long, double-sided ballots; far larger than usual, Summers added. Most of the length came from the extensively worded constitutional amendments voters could decide on. She said it was a combination of the ballots’ numbers and size that most likely filled the machine’s memory earlier than anticipated.

“If we ever have that large of a ballot, with this many issues on the ballot, we are going to have to have those conversations with our equipment vendor to make sure we have the tools that we need … (so) there’s no interruptions like this. We were here until 2 o’clock in the morning trying to get the results posted,” she said.

Election workers were able to use another machine and made sure not to add more than 4,500 ballots to it.

No votes or ballots were spoiled or votes impacted during the process, Summers said, it simply made counting them take longer than it would have otherwise.

“Nothing really broke with the equipment … it was just the maximum capacity had been reached for the memory stick, and once it was maxed it was so maxed it could not take the upload,” Summers said. “… We knew what happened when it happened, but we weren’t expecting it because we thought we had until 5,000 (ballots).”

Workers used larger-capacity secure data storage devices from other Unisyn systems to upload results. Summers said workers would have worked throughout the night if they needed to in order to accurately report each race or ballot decision.

She said other counties with similar or larger populations experienced the same issue and that Unisyn would be releasing a statement addressing it in the near future.