Candidates and the public will have to wait a little longer to find out the final tally from Tuesday’s election. A full day after the vote, the paper ballots in both districts remained uncounted Wednesday.
At the Election System office on St. Croix, board members spent the day sifting through the approximately 2,700 paper ballots cast in the district.
Each paper ballot contained five pages on which votes were cast, one each for the Senate, delegate, school board, board of elections and referendum election. Before the votes can be counted, each ballot must be removed from its envelope and then each of the five pages must be separated into separate stacks.
This process is proving very time consuming, according to Board Chairman Rupert Ross. He said every ballot from each of the district’s 14 precincts must be hand sorted before the vote counting could begin. In addition to the paper ballots cast at the polls, he said an additional 600 absentee ballots would also need to go through the process.
Election officials on St. Croix began work at around 1 p.m. this afternoon, and by 5 p.m. they had only completed sorting one precinct and were struggling through a second. Ross said the board would continue working Wednesday until 10 p.m. and then begin again 10 a.m. Thursday.
He added that the board for the St. Thomas/St. John district was also moving through the same process, though they had far fewer paper ballots to sort.
Ross could not give a firm estimate of when the sorting process would be completed, but said he doubted it would be before Friday. He added that the board has until Nov. 21 to certify the election, though the paper ballot count should not take that long. In fact, Ross expressed optimism that the process would speed up somewhat as board members got more practice.
“We’ve got the system down pat,” he said. “It takes a while to get to top speed.”
This is the first general election to be held since a bill was passed earlier this year mandating that people be given a choice between paper and electronic ballots. The board of elections had expressed concerns over the summer about how long the process might take and how much money it would cost to print and count the ballots.
With so many votes still uncounted, it is difficult to say with any certainty who will be elected to serve in the 30th Legislature. This is especially true in the St. Croix district where the number of uncounted ballots (3,300) in greater than the total number of votes for Kenneth Gittens (3,042), the man currently in the seventh and final spot. That means none of the 32 candidates on the St. Croix ballot have yet been mathematically eliminated.
