In a world often full of election denial, conspiracy theories and concerns over foreign groups possibly tampering with our election results, have you ever wondered whether the totals that the voting machines in your local voting center come up are accurate and how we could even know whether those results are accurate?
Both are good questions.
Thanks to a new recount procedure, which was used for the first time in Kentucky last Thursday morning, we now know whether the machines and the human election officials get the same vote totals.
Every so often the Kentucky General Assembly gets something right like it did with passage of House Bill 53 back in April.
House Bill 53 mandated that after each election, the Kentucky Secretary of State’s Office would select at least one voting center or voting precinct in each county and require that the votes from one race on the ballots in that location undergo a “hand-to-eye” recount by the local county board of elections or its designee.
In other words, the law mandates that the state randomly select a voting center or precinct in each county and one race in each of those voting centers or precincts is recounted by hand by local election officials to see whether their totals matched the totals that the voting machine tabulated on election night.
The recount happened last Thursday morning.
In Whitley County, the Corbin Primary School voting center was selected along with balloting for Constitutional Amendment One, which gave Kentucky residents the option of barring non-citizens from voting in elections.
The recount took a bit over two hours, and there were no changes, according to News Journal reporter Timothy Wyatt, who observed the recount.
By randomly requiring voting centers or voting precincts to undergo a random recount of a race on the ballot in that precinct, the Kentucky General Assembly has made it very difficult, if not impossible, to rig an election where people vote one way yet the voting machines record those votes another way.
Let me note for the record that I advocated for a similar idea in a Nov. 4, 2020, column where I suggested that every county use paper ballots, like the ones in use in Whitley County where voters fill out the paper ballots and then feed them into the voting machine, which tallies the vote.
I suggested that the Kentucky General Assembly require each county board of elections to audit 5 percent of their voting precincts after each election by going through and hand counting all of the paper ballots in those precincts in order to ensure that the machine total matches what the hand count is.
Since that time, Whitley County has wisely switched from 36 voting precincts to 9 voting centers.
Speaking of elections, Whitley County voters appear to really like early voting.
Out of 15,164 ballots cast in Whitley County for the General Election this year, more than one-third, 5,608, of those ballots were cast by people voting during three days of no excuse early in-person voting.
Also, a total of 871 people requested mail-in absentee ballots, and 104 people cast their ballots during six days of in-person excused absentee voting, which is strictly for people unable to make it to the polls on Election Day or during one of the three days of early in-person voting for everyone.
In other words, about 38 percent people in Whitley County voted prior to Election Day.
In terms of voter turnout for Election Day, about 55 percent of registered voters cast their ballots this year in Whitley County, which is on par with voter turnout for recent presidential elections.
Nearly 55 percent of voters turned out in Whitley County to cast their ballots during the last presidential election in 2020. Voter turnout for 2016’s presidential election was 51.84 percent and 50.35 percent for the 2012 presidential election.
