After voters wrote in Mr. Potato Head, Mickey Mouse and hundreds of other names on their ballots, an election official awarded all those votes to the real candidate in a low-profile South Georgia race.
The secretary of state’s office recently opened an investigation into the 1,623-vote miscount, which wasn’t detected by an audit of the November election.
The error didn’t change the outcome of the one-candidate race for Sumter County soil and water district supervisor, but election watchdogs say the mistake shows how results could be altered.
“I’ve never seen a write-in vote switched to someone completely different. That’s the biggest problem — changing the voter’s intent to someone else,” said Phillip Davis, a data expert who analyzed Georgia ballots.
Georgia election officials said the mistake was isolated to a down-ballot race that required a manual review of write-in votes. They said election audits verified the accuracy of most voters’ choices but didn’t include write-ins.
Credit: File
Credit: File
Sumter County Election Supervisor LaSandra Patterson acknowledged the error in an email to state election officials Friday, saying she misunderstood instructions when she assigned all 1,750 write-in votes to Jeffery Clements, the lone candidate for Lower Chattahoochee River Soil and Water Conservation District Supervisor.
A review of ballots by Davis showed that Clements actually received about 127 write-in votes.
Voters wrote in a variety of other names for the race, including Jesus, Joe Blow, Brad Pitt, James Bond, Aquaman and Santa.
Because Clements was the only person who filed paperwork to qualify as a write-in candidate, and no other candidate signed up to run, votes for other candidates didn’t count.
Decisions about unclear ballots — such as write-in candidates and partially filled-in ovals — are usually made by a three-person panel responsible for reviewing votes.
In this case, Patterson appeared to assign the votes to Clements through her county’s central elections computer a few days after the election, according to time stamps on ballot images.
Mike Hassinger, a spokesperson for the secretary of state’s office, said a statewide audit that compared the text of ballots with the machine count double-checked election results.
The text-recognition audit showed a close match to the election night count, finding just 87 discrepancies among 5.3 million Georgia ballots. Almost all the inconsistencies were caused by unclear marks on absentee ballots that required human review.
“Once again, this shows that machines count better than humans, and our statewide audit proved that,” Hassinger said. “We look forward to completing our thorough investigation to see exactly why proper adjudication wasn’t followed.”
The audit reviewed whether a voter wrote a candidate’s name, but it didn’t audit which name was written, said Aaron Wilson, president of Enhanced Voting, which conducted the audit for Georgia. Checking the names written on ballots wasn’t within the audit’s scope.
Marilyn Marks, executive director for the Coalition for Good Governance, an election security organization, said the secretary of state’s office misrepresented the accuracy of the audit.
“There is no justification for over 1,600 votes for noncandidates, including cartoon characters, being unlawfully counted for the winning candidate, nor for the $1.5 million so-called ballot image ‘audit’ failing to disclose these egregious irregularities,” Marks said.
Credit: Seeger Gray / AJC
Credit: Seeger Gray / AJC
Marks called for the Georgia General Assembly to review the case and prevent potential conflicts of interest in audits conducted by the same people who manage elections — the secretary of state’s office and Enhanced Voting, which also runs the state’s election results website.
Patterson declined to comment when reached by phone last week. None of the five members of the Sumter County elections board responded to an email seeking comment. Clements also couldn’t be reached for comment.
After an investigation by the secretary of state’s office, the case will be presented to the State Election Board, which has the power to impose fines, issue reprimands and refer cases to prosecutors.
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