A Pennington County computer software accounting error, and lack of a manually compiled city tally sheet, were blamed Wednesday for reporting mistakes in Tuesday's municipal and school election results.
A late-night double-check changed numbers but not outcomes, as the South Valley Drive annexation passed and winners remained the same in individual races. The one difference is that city taxpayers will be spared the expense of a runoff for Ward 4's Rapid City Council post.
<snip>
In reality, only 5,613 ballots were cast in Tuesday's election, not the 10,488 initially reported.
"It's not that we found ballots. It's not that we lost ballots," Pearson said. "It's just combining them didn't work."
No one suspected a problem, Pearson said, because the scanners had worked smoothly all night.
But late in the evening, election officials started to question the initial vote tally of 10,000 votes, which seemed excessive to some. A manual audit revealed the error.
"By the time we discovered it and realized the right totals, everyone was at home and in bed," Pearson said.
City election officials had not kept a manual tally of votes Tuesday evening, a step that could have caught the scanners' math error, Pearson said. A written record is standard procedure for all county elections, she said.
City Finance Officer Jim Preston referred questions about the election count to Pearson.
"They're machines. I've learned not to trust them," Pearson said. "We have so many checks and balances we go through."
http://www.rapidcityjournal.com/articles/2009/06/04/news/local/doc4a26be929b134639509302.txt
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