A former Lehi City Council candidate
is considering having everyone vote again, suggesting the primary election may
have been tainted.
An error executed in an Excel
spreadsheet program on Tuesday gave results reflecting 2,094 more votes than
were counted.
“I may want to call for a new
election,” Bill Conley said. “I don't know what happened, but I smell something
very fishy and I want to get to the bottom of the discrepancy.”
The city’s recorder, Marilyn
Banasky, caught the error when she was putting in the candidate results by Lehi
precinct on Wednesday morning.
“When those numbers didn’t match the
ones I had from election night, I looked at the formula and found that I had
one cell incorrect in the formula,” Banasky said.
Once Banasky changed the formula to
the correct cell, she found the numbers matched the precinct totals and posted
the accurate numbers online. While there was the same number of ballots, 4,572,
there were a smaller count of votes per candidate.
The new numbers showed the same
winners and the same losers with Paige Albrecht, Johnny Revill, Mike Southwick,
Reno Mahe, Ted Omer, Kim Holmes moving on to the general election; and Bill
Conley and Wayne A Logan falling by the wayside.
“Just to be clear, there wasn’t a
vote miscount, there was an error in the formula of the excel spreadsheet that
I used,” Banasky said on Thursday.
The formula error did not change the
percentages that the candidates received, nor did it change the six candidates
that will move forward in to the general election.
“As you know, the vote totals will
change from the unofficial results that are given on election night to the
official totals that will be given to the Board of Canvass on Aug. 25,
2015 due to the receipt of additional ballots that were postmarked as of
Aug. 10, 2015,” she said.
Conley said he is concerned his
votes may have been miscounted on Tuesday.
In an email to Banasky, he asked how
the votes were counted and how could he be assured they were really
counted.
“It seems to me that counting a
vote would be a very simple process, were these votes counted by hand or put
through a machine?” Conley said.
He said he would like to see all the
votes and the envelopes that they came in. Ballots are kept secure in ballot
boxes in a locked room until the official canvass is complete.
“I was shocked last night with the
results and I am concerned that all the votes that were cast for me may not
have been counted,” he said.
Cathy Allred is north Utah County
reporter for the Daily Herald and can be reached at heraldextra.ca@gmail.com
and followed on Facebook: North County News.
http://www.heraldextra.com/news/local/north/lehi/former-lehi-candidate-considers-revote-after-votes-miscalculated/article_31bb0632-8562-5e73-a201-98ae0e337c58.html
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