The recount of Warren County votes cast in a statewide Superior Court judge race in the Nov. 3 general election is complete ahead of schedule.

Director of Elections Lisa Zuck said that recounting the votes took a relatively short time last Wednesday. "It only took us a couple hours," she said. "It was pretty cut and dry."

The statewide recount was triggered when the difference between the fourth- and fifth-place finishers in the voting for four Superior Court judge positions was within 2,300 votes.

Republicans Judy Olson, Sallie Mundy, and Paula Ott were elected without question.

Democrat Anne Lazarus came in fourth in the preliminary totals, with 725,798 votes statewide. Democrats Robert Colville (723,540) and Kevin Francis McCarthy (713,116), and Republican Temp Smith (722,264) were legally close enough to trigger the recount, according to Secretary of the Commonwealth Pedro Cortes.

Because Smith did not voluntarily opt out of requiring the recount - both Colville and McCarthy did opt out - Zuck, and every other county director of elections in the state, had to check the results.

The recount showed that the county's original results were very accurate.

Out of almost 20,000 Warren County votes, Marakay Rogers, a Libertarian Party candidate, was the only candidate whose total was changed locally.

Zuck said one vote was added to Rogers' tally as a result of the recount. Rogers received only two percent of the votes cast statewide.

Votes on the absentee ballots, provisional ballots and emergency paper ballots were counted individually, Zuck said. The touchscreen machines used for a vast majority of the votes each kept a running total of votes cast. For those, Zuck only had to check the total for each machine.

The county will be reimbursed at a rate of $50 per machine, according to Zuck. That's $4,300 for the 86 machines. The statewide cost of the recount could be as much as $1.3 million, according to Cortes.

The county's results were in the mail on Friday, Zuck said. The deadline to complete the recount is Nov. 25.