Times Observer photo by Brian Ferry During Friday’s vote adjudication process, Warren County Director of Elections Lisa Rivett (left), Deputy Director Krystle Ransom, and Commissioner Ben Kafferlin examine a provisional ballot cast in Tuesday’s primary election.

The final vote count from Tuesday’s Primary Election could be posted as soon as today.

The county’s voting equipment takes care of the easy stuff, producing same-day results for the regular votes in the polling places and for a majority of mail-in and absentee ballots.

Still, there were just over 1,500 items that required the eyes of election officials and possibly the Warren County Board of Elections.

The board of elections started looking at those items on Friday morning and they expected to be at it all day.

There were seven provisional ballots to adjudicate. Three of those were filled out by people who are not registered anywhere in Pennsylvania – not a tough call for the board.

About 20 ballots were received in the mail after the deadline and not accepted.

Eight other mailed ballots had problems that made them unacceptable.

The vast majority of the work in front of the board on Friday was composed of write-in votes. There were also overvotes and ambiguous marks identified by the ballot reading equipment that required some human attention.

Warren County Director of Elections Lisa Rivett and Deputy Director of Elections Krystle Ransom ran the computers that showed the ballots. They consulted with board members when there were questions about ballots.

Some overvotes were attributed to a voter marking too many boxes – generally one or more for ballot candidates and one or more write-ins. If the voter indicated a write-in, but didn’t write a name in, that write-in was thrown out and the vote tallied for the ballot candidate (or candidates). If there was a name written in resulting in too many votes in a race, none of those votes were counted.

The ballot reader accepts certain markings on mail-in and absentee ballots as good votes. When the machine cannot determine if a circle is filled in properly, it designates that ballot for a human check, and a board member has to ascertain the intent of the voter.

The board worked through about 200 of the 1,500 in a little over an hour. They finished with the mail-in ballots – about 1,600 were received, many with write-ins – around 11:30 a.m. and moved on to the Election Day ballots.

Rivett and Ransom did some legwork before the count event. Rivett said they had gone through the list of announced write-in campaigns and logged them into the system. Then, when one of those names came up in the correct race, Rivett and Ransom could simply click through and accept the vote.

Each time there was a new write-in name that was appropriate – a person who lives in the municipality in question – they entered a new candidate’s name for that race.

For county-wide races, unannounced candidacies for positions where there was a ballot candidate were not counted. The overwhelming majority of voters cast ballots for the county offices. No write-in could have made its way to the ballot. Votes for candidates from voters in the ‘wrong’ party were counted. If someone running unopposed as a Republican received write-ins from Democrats, that tally was kept. If that person receives enough votes from Democrats, their name will appear on both sides of the ballot in the fall.

At times, the adjudication was an exercise in the absurd.

There were votes for No one, Mickey Mouse, Bozo, and popular culture characters, among others. Those were not counted. One ballot included write-ins for both Donald Trump and Ralph Nader. While those names belong to real people, they are not residents of Warren County nor recognized write-in candidates for state-wide judge races.

If officials didn’t recognize a name as a real resident of the appropriate place, they asked. Most names were known to the board members.

TURNOUT

More than one-quarter of the county’s registered major party voters voted on Tuesday or mailed in ballots.

On the Republican side, 4,575 voters out of 14,590 registered voters cast votes – about 31 percent.

Fewer Democrats – 1,957 out of 7,887 or about 25 percent — voted.