Here’s what happened to Henrico’s ‘missing’ absentee ballots

There were some raised eyebrows Wednesday when Henrico Voter Registration and Elections officials realized that they had failed to report nearly 15,000 absentee ballots with a batch of other absentee votes earlier that morning.

When they did report those ballots later yesterday, the votes helped swing the Seventh District Congressional election to incumbent Democrat Abigail Spanberger, who last night claimed victory in her spirited race against Republican challenger Nick Freitas. The two are separated by just 5,132 votes among nearly 450,000 reported. Freitas hasn't yet conceded but said that he would make a statement Friday, after votes in the district were canvassed.

Thursday, Henrico Registrar Mark Coakley explained to the Citizen what happened to cause the ballot mix-up.

The ballots in question all involved in-person absentee votes, he said. When a voter casts a ballot in person, he or she scans the ballot into a machine just as voters do on Election Day, and memory sticks in the machine take images of each ballot.

Each machine has two sticks – a primary one and a backup, he said. Each 4 GB stick can hold about 9,000 ballots, while an 8 GB stick can hold about 17,000.

As more sticks began to fill up, Coakley suggested that (instead of buying new ones) officials scan more in-person absentee ballots using a machine that typically scans only provisional ballots.

On election night and well into the early morning hours of Wednesday, Coakley’s team was uploading the data from each memory stick used during the absentee process to produce an overall absentee report to send to the Virginia Department of Elections.

But, he said, the report’s parameters by default were set to collect only the data from absentee machine sticks – and not from the provisional ballot machine. As a result, the ballots that had been saved on the provisional machine memory stick (just shy of 15,000) were not part of that report, Coakley said.

In their haste to send the report to the Virginia Department of Elections shortly after 2:30 a.m. Wednesday, Coakley said, Henrico officials didn’t compare the data to an earlier report they’d produced Tuesday night that reflected a total of all in-person and absentee ballots they had received.

Later in the day Wednesday, officials from the Virginia Public Access Project noticed what appeared to be a 21,000-vote discrepancy between the number of absentee votes the county had reported to the VDOE and the total number it had identified Tuesday night. VPAP Tweeted about the discrepancy, prompting Coakley and his team to review their data immediately.

“When VPAP sent their Tweet, that threw up all sorts of red flags,” Coakley said, “because I knew we didn’t have 21,000 [completed].”

But he and others in the office then took the recording tapes from each machine that was used to scan ballots, compared the total number of ballots reflected on them and compared that with the data they had reported to VDOE. That’s when they realized that the memory stick from the provisional machine had been ignored during their earlier report.

“We would have caught it yesterday afternoon,” Coakley said Thursday, since such a reconciliation of data is a standard part of the reporting process.

Additional ballots still remain
Another 5,500 or so ballots – which combined with the ones on the provisional stick amount to roughly the 21,000 VPAP believed were missing from the county’s overall totals – are still in the process of being counted, Coakley said, and may be completed Thursday.

In addition, there are another 6,000 or so absentee ballots that still may arrive to Coakley’s office. They were requested by, and mailed to, voters but have not yet been returned, he said. In order to be counted, they must have been postmarked no later than Election Day and must be received by the office by Friday at noon. Officials from the office are making regular trips to the post office to pick up any ballots that may still be arriving.

And, there were several hundred provisional ballots cast by Henrico voters. Those typically are cast when a voter doesn’t appear on the poll book, Coakley said. The Henrico Electoral Board will meet at 2 p.m. Friday to analyze each individual situation to determine if the voters were registered or not. Anyone who cast a provisional ballot in Henrico will be able to check his or her voting history online next week to see if that ballot was approved and counted or not.

Coakley doesn’t expect that all absentee ballots will be counted until early next week. His office has seven individual teams of three people who work to count ballots; it takes about four minutes to process and record each one, he said, and the teams typically complete a total of about 2,000 per day.

“They’re putting in some good hours,” he said.

Those teams were able to process mailed or hand-delivered absentee ballots as they came in ahead of the election, according to Coakley, but officials couldn’t print reports indicating their actual votes until after the polls closed Tuesday. The teams worked three days a week to scan those early ballots.

By Monday or Tuesday next week, once all remaining ballots have been tallied, recorded and reported, Henrico’s electoral board will complete its certification of the county’s votes and send it to the Virginia Department of Elections.