One-third of provisional ballots from May 5 primary election count in Monroe County

On Friday, starting at 12:01 p.m. Monroe County’s election board reviewed all 62 provisional ballots from the May 5 primary and determined that 21 of them should be accepted.

Ballots are set aside as provisional when they are voted, if the eligibility of the voter is uncertain right at that time. They’re counted only if the election board later verifies that the voter was qualified to cast a ballot.

On Friday, immediately after deciding that 21 additional ballots should be accepted, the extra batch was sent through the tabulator by Bob White with B&L IT Services and added to the 16,493 ballots that were counted by the end of Election Day.

County clerk Nicole Browne noted that none of the contests on the ballot had outcomes close enough for the additional votes to alter the results.

The odd start time for the meeting stems from the fact that noon was the deadline for “curing” some categories of provisional ballots, like those cast by someone who was not able to show the required identification on Election Day. Such voters had 10 days to submit their identification to the voter registration office.

Most rejected ballots fell into familiar categories under Indiana law: voters who cast a provisional ballot without ID and then failed to return with identification within 10 days; voters who were registered in a different county; and voters who went to the wrong polling place in Monroe County’s precinct‑based system, and never made it to the correct place before polls closed.

Accepted provisional ballots generally involved voters who cured a defect on time, like those who lacked ID on Election Day, but later appeared at Election Central within the 10‑day window with proper identification. Other voters with accepted provisional ballots had been properly registered all along, but were marked as unregistered because of a misspelled name or due to an address‑change form that had not yet been fully processed.

One technical issue involved absentee ballots from married couples and others in the same household whose signatures did not appear to match. In some cases, husbands and wives had accidentally signed each other’s ballot envelopes or applications. Election staff sent the affected voters forms so they could confirm the signature swap. It looked like three pairs of voters cured swapped signatures, and all six of their ballots were counted.

The three-member election board on Friday consisted of: county clerk Nicole Browne; Danny Shields, who is the Republican Party’s appointee; and Carolyn VandeWiele, a former election board chair who was serving as proxy for Penny Githens, the Democratic Party’s appointee.

Browne alluded to VandeWiele in her wrap-up of the afternoon’s work:

I would summarize the outcome of today’s proceedings as wonderful. I feel blessed to work with an election board that we got it done—we got it done in a timely manner. We’re incredibly fortunate to have a proxy that was a previous election board member, and so I think things went smoothly.