While local election officials will open voting machines today to certify the results of Saturday’s election, one contest that won’t be settled is the Senate District 16 race, which is potentially headed for a three-person runoff next month.
The Secretary of State’s office reported on its official election results page late Saturday, with 100% of precincts reporting, that Republican Franklin Foil had edged out fellow Republican Steve Carter by just eight votes to make the runoff against front-running Democrat Beverly Brooks Thompson. However, the secretary’s office called the candidates on Sunday, informing them a mistake had been made and that Foil and Carter were actually tied.
Monday morning, Secretary of State Kyle Ardoin’s press secretary Tyler Brey blamed the miscount on a crease in some of the paper absentee ballots, which he said threw off the Canon scanner’s ability to accurately read the ballots and tabulate the votes.
Brey, later in the day, changed the reason, saying the problem was actually due to a batch of ballots that were mistakenly scanned and counted twice.
East Baton Rouge Parish Registrar of Voters Steve Rayborn, whose office did the scanning, says there was a problem with the scanner’s ability to read some of the mail-in paper ballots—not only in East Baton Rouge Parish but statewide.
“It is my understanding they’re looking into that to see what happened,” he says.
However, the problem that changed the outcome of the District 16 race had nothing to do with creases in the paper, he says, but everything to do with with 74 double-scanned ballots.
He says the problem was not detected until nearly 8:45 p.m. Saturday night and that a representative from the Secretary of State’s office, overseeing the process in his office that day, recommended that all absentee votes for the parish be rescanned in order to get an accurate count.
Still, the inaccurate count was forwarded to the Secretary of State’s website and posted, even as the rescan was underway.
Why forward data that was knowingly inaccurate?
“The Secretary of State’s office recommended we just release it and make any corrections after the fact,” Rayborn says. “That’s why we always say election returns are unofficial and not final.”
Rayborn says he was personally aware of the need to rescan the ballots and made the Secretary of State’s office aware of the problem but was told to forward the inaccurate data anyway.
Ardoin, who, himself, is in a reelection battle, has so far declined to comment on the series of events. But Foil says he is planning to file a public records request today and will likely ask Wednesday for an official recount of absentee ballots.
