State house candidate calls for recount, files complaint against election commissioner
The race between two Republicans for the Arkansas District 25 representative seat proved so close that one called for a recount amid questions about the Crawford County election commissioner's actions.
The final count shows that Jody Harris lost the race to Chad Puryear by seven votes. Harris called for the recount, which showed that the three counties involved counted the votes correctly the first time.
By Thursday Washington, Franklin and Crawford Counties had all completed their recounts.
Harris also filed a complaint against Bill Coleman, the chairman of the Crawford County election commission, with the Arkansas State Board of Election Commissioners.
“It’s cause for questions, and it’s cause for alarm," Harris said about Coleman's actions.
Harris said there are three parts to her complaint against Coleman. First, the workers did not count absentee ballots at the beginning of the night as is protocol. Second, Coleman did not mark which ballots were duplicates, and third, Coleman took home 27 canceled ballots prior to returning them days later. Eight of those 27 ballots were for the District 25 race, Coleman said.
The Crawford County election commission should have marked those 27 ballots as duplicates because they had to be transferred to new ballots. This was because the absentee ballots were sent out before all the precinct parts were made final. So those 27 ballots did not have the same matching barcode as the rest of the ballots and had to be transferred to new ballots.
Coleman said he accidentally took home the 27 canceled ballots as he was moving equipment from one election commission office to another.
“In a race this close it begs some questions," Harris said.
Harris said she is considering taking further legal action but is unsure exactly what that would look like yet.
Bryan King, who is running for a state senate position, has experience working with Coleman and said Coleman is not to be trusted.
“There is too many problems happening," Bryan said. "Too many things that they should not be trusted."
King called for the incident to be investigated. He compared Coleman taking the ballots home to a banker taking someone's deposit home.
Puryear put his faith in Coleman and the democratic procedures.
“I trust the electoral process and have faith in our system and as shown in those three counties we got the same votes every time," Puryear said.
Alex Gladden is a University of Arkansas graduate. She previously reported for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and The Jonesboro Sun before joining the Times Record. She can be contacted at agladden@swtimes.com.
This article originally appeared on Fort Smith Times Record: State house candidate calls for recount
