County allowed to count 99 additional ballots outside of House District 49

GOSHEN — The county’s top election official expects to see no change in the results when the state is done recounting close to 6,000 votes cast in an Indiana House primary race.

House District 49 candidate Cindi Hajicek filed a recount request in her race against incumbent Joanna King on May 15. King won the race with about 65 percent of the vote, 3,805 to 2,047.

Because it’s a state-level race, the hand count of ballots is handled by the state government. The request triggered a sweeping seizure of Elkhart County’s ballots and voting equipment, delaying local efforts to count provisional votes, according to Clerk of the Circuit Court Chris Anderson.

“All of our equipment, our election product, the ballots, is back under state impoundment,” he said Thursday following an emergency meeting of the local election board. “At some point in time in the future, they will arrive back in Elkhart County to conduct their hand recount of the ballots.”

The recount request also froze the vote count at the totals given in unofficial results the night of May 7, meaning no more ballots could be added to the race. Anderson said the election board planned to meet on May 17 to address provisional ballots but was headed off by Hajicek’s challenge.

“We received the order of impoundment sometime early evening on Wednesday (May 15), saying that we could then not continue with our provisional ballot meeting that we were going to hold on Friday morning (May 17),” Anderson said. “So Thursday morning (May 16) at 8 a.m., the State Board of Accounts and the Indiana State Police arrived and changed the locks on the election storage area, changed the locks on the warehouse. We do not have access to any of it until they are done with their recount.”

He estimated Friday that there were eight to 10 additional ballots within District 49 that were frozen out.

“If House District 49 appears on that ballot anywhere, that ballot will not be counted, ever,” he said. “(Those include) late-arriving (ballots) on election day that didn’t get processed on election day and military overseas.”

An amended impoundment order later allowed the election board to finish its job and count 99 additional ballots from precincts outside of District 49. The board conducted the count on Thursday morning, once representatives from the state police and state board of accounts had arrived and provided access to the impounded material.

Those additional ballots included provisional, military, overseas and absentee as well as some that could not be scanned correctly by the tabulator machines on Election Day, Anderson said. He said there were five or six provisional ballots that were not counted because the voters didn’t submit their photo IDs to the election board by the deadline.

As a result of the 99 additional ballots being counted, he said, a tie was broken in the race for Union Township Precinct 2 Republican committeeman. Jacob Dermott now has 106 votes to Michael Peterson’s 105.

Anderson said it’s unlikely that the eight to 10 uncounted ballots in District 49 would have swayed any other close races unless they all came from within the same precinct.

Anderson said he has not received any indication of when the hand count of the approximately 5,800 ballots in the House District 49 race will be finished. He said there is a paper ballot for every vote cast in Elkhart County, as the county has used a hybrid system since 2019 that prints ballots for voters to inspect before they hand it in to be tabulated.

“They will be sending, I’m not exactly sure how many people, but they will be organized into several numerous teams of multiple individuals so that there is a double-check in terms of, ‘OK, yes, this ballot says it’s a vote for Candidate A, and they said Candidate A, and then the person marking it marked Candidate A. They said Candidate B and yes they said Candidate B and then it got marked for Candidate A,’” Anderson said. “So there’s a double-check process in terms of how those go through and how all of that is logged and then tabulated to make sure that the results that were tabulated on election night, and also the additionals that were counted this morning, that they were all tabulated correctly.”

Anderson believes whenever the results come in, they will show that the votes were counted correctly the first time.

“I think the recount is going to show that it was tabulated correctly and that the paper ballots that we have are going to indicate that there was spread, but I don’t foresee any change,” he said.

Indiana law allows a candidate to file a recount request, regardless of the vote margin, within two weeks of an election. They have to pay a bond of $100 for the first 10 precincts included in the recount plus $10 for each additional precinct, if the margin is 1 percent or less, according to Anderson.

The cost is $100 per extra precinct if the margin is over 1 percent. There are 35 precincts in District 49.

Chad Crabtree, chair of the Elkhart County Democratic Party, expressed a concern Friday over the provisional votes in District 49 that are under lock and key. He also showed dismay that current election law allows a recount request even on such a wide margin as the District 49 race, potentially muddying the waters for multiple other races.

He said he hopes to see the law changed.

“One vote not counted is one too many,” Crabtree said.