Nearly 700 people in Mingo County voted on ballots that had a wrong candidate listed.(Lori Kersey | West Virginia Watch)
The office of the state’s chief election officer is “gathering evidence and records” regarding an error that led to nearly 700 people in Mingo County voting with incorrect ballots.
Jeff Disibbio, the Democrat candidate for the state Senate’s 6th district race, was left off the county’s ballot during part of early voting. The ballot instead listed Randy Fowler, who won the Democratic primary but was disqualified from running in the general election due to failure to file campaign finance reports.
“We’ve got to figure out what’s going on,” Donald Kersey, chief of staff for the West Virginia Secretary of State’s Office, told West Virginia MetroNews’ Hoppy Kercheval Wednesday morning. “I believe everybody down there has good intentions. I believe everybody’s trying to do the best they can with what they’ve got.
“These are big deals that are affecting not just candidates’ ability to get a fair shake, but voters’ abilities to cast the ballot for someone who’s eligible and who’s supposed to be on the ballot. A huge deal,” he said.
Mingo County Clerk Larry “Yogi” Croaff said Wednesday he was notified of the error Monday by one of the county’s vendors that prepares ballots, and that early voting was suspended for two hours while ballots were corrected for voters going forward.
The latest ballot error comes after about 200 Democrats were also found to have incorrectly voted in the Republican contest for the 6th district during Mingo County’s May’s primary election, Kersey said.
Croaff told West Virginia Watch Wednesday morning that notice of the error has been sent to people who voted with absentee ballots. Absentee voters may submit a corrected ballot.
People who voted early may also come back into the courthouse and cast a provisional ballot in the race if the error affected the way they voted, Croaff said. The county’s board of canvassers will decide if the vote should be counted. Provisional ballots are generally used when there are questions about a person’s eligibility to vote in the election.
Kersey clarified to West Virginia Watch that there’s no statutory procedure for the board of canvassers to count provisional ballots for voters who voted in person early. Under the circumstances, provisional ballots can’t be counted if an early voter’s ballot was not challenged, he said.
“There’s no way to fix it when you vote in person because those ballots, once they go in the ballot box, they’re anonymous. Your name’s not on it,” Kersey said on MetroNews. “…because the Constitution protects your secrecy and your right to privacy. So once those ballots are in ballot box, there’s nothing we can do about it.”
As of Wednesday morning, only three people had called Croaff’s office about the issue, he said. None of the callers had recognized the error by themselves, he said.
“Since the news aired, the two things that people are calling – ‘Was Babydog’s dad affected, or was Donald Trump affected?’ – That’s the only calls that I’m getting,” Croaff said. “And I’m telling them, ‘No, that race was not affected.’”
Babydog is, of course, a bulldog and political prop belonging to West Virginia Gov. Jim Justice, a Republican running for a seat in the U.S. Senate. In Mingo County, Republican voters’ registrations outnumber that of Democrats by nearly 1,700, according to the latest data from the Secretary of State’s Office.
The sixth senatorial district includes Mercer, McDowell, Mingo counties, as well as a portion of Wayne County. The ballot error does not appear to have affected other counties besides Mingo County, Kersey said.
Croaff said he does not know why the error occurred and has been trying to figure it out.
“Was it an error on my part, or an error on the vendor’s part? Or whose fault was the error on?”
Kersey told Kerchavel that Disibbio’s name was included on the certified list of candidates that the Secretary of State’s Office sent to Mingo County via email and certified mail. The county’s board of ballot commissioners met to review the ballot. The board corrected another error on the ballot — a name of an independent candidate being omitted — but missed that Fowler was listed as the Democrat instead of Disibbio.
“This is a big issue,” Kersey said. “Six-hundred-seventy-eight people showed up to vote, and they didn’t have the right candidates on the ballot in the state Senate race.”
Kersey told Kerchavel the office needs to determine if someone should be held accountable for the error. State code has “remedies” for officials who do not do their duties, he said.
“Here there was a board of ballot commissioners, the three people that were appointed by the political parties and the county clerk itself, who missed the error,” Kersey said. “And so there’s all sorts of things that could occur, but right now, we want to focus on making sure people understand that the error was caught and it was fixed within an hour and a half of us knowing about it, the ballots had been reprogrammed.”
Kersey said officials would have to wait and see the outcome of the election. If the race is decided by a margin of error of about 700 or less, that would be a “very valid reason” for Democrats to challenge the outcome, he said. The challenge would go to the state Senate, according to the state’s election laws.
In a statement Tuesday, the chair of the state Democrat party said that the party would “exhaust every legal option to ensure the integrity of our democratic process is upheld.” Disibbio said he would take “all necessary actions available to ensure we have a free and fair election for State Senate throughout all the counties of District 6, including Mingo County.”
“There would be a hearing by the state Senate to determine whether or not the error was enough to throw out the ballots from early voting, to throw out the whole election, or to come up with some other remedy,” Kersey said. “But right now we just have to wait and see how the election goes.”
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