Election night numbers are in for Elkhart County
Nov. 7—GOSHEN — Unofficial results for the General Election in Elkhart County are in after a technology glitch caused a delay in counting early voting and mail-in ballots Tuesday night.
Elkhart County First Deputy Clark Carol Smith said, "Normally early voting, we open it election day and we tabulate it, we start around 4, running the tabulator," Smith said. "I started it. I was like, I don't know, 300 ballots in, when my machine went down. I had to wait for a tech, plus the problem was we did not have enough workers at election central to open the quantity of envelopes that we have. When you're talking 30,000 envelopes, it takes quite a while."
Unlike election day ballots, where voters can make their selections and run them through the in-person tabulator, which submits the information to the installed encrypted USB drive, which is then taken to election headquarters at the Elkhart County Administration Building to have its information pulled and added to the rest of the votes, early votes must be placed individually into an envelope. This means that each individual envelope must be opened, the ballot unfolded, and manually scanned into the tabulator like voters in person do on election day.
"I'm not saying it's bad to vote early," Smith said. "It is an option. I'm just saying it changes dynamics for us and the way we handle product. ... The difference between election day and early voting is there's no envelope. The ballot goes straight into the tabulator. You don't have to do that handling of all that."
A technical difficulty with one of the encrypted USB drives that holds the vote tallies at one of the vote centers left them unable to submit all 29 vote centers in Elkhart County Tuesday night.
"You have to close the poll in order for the stick to be ready to upload the data," Smith explained. "What happened was they had pulled it, which doesn't risk any of the data or anything, but I can't enter the results in that state, so I had to put it back in (a tabulator) ... I have to close out of the poll first and then the stick will be a readable mode."
But all the tabulators from the vote centers had previous information from the votes that day currently on them.
"I had to put it in one that had no ballots on it," Smith explained. "We didn't do it election night because all the (tabulators) that were here, we had been feeding ballots so (they) had counts, and we waited until the next day and closed out (a) poll so that we could tabulate."
She installed the USB into the cleared tabulator, closed out the program, and from there uploading to the main tabulator containing all the results was a simple process.
"It's not anything that we can say, 'Well, holy moly, this went wrong,'" Smith said. "Bigger turnout for early voting, ran out of the proper envelopes, couldn't get what we needed, had to downsize which meant folding the ballots, which just made it more time-consuming to open. ... It was just a storyline of events, but we had the same issue in 2020. It took I think four days to finish."
There were a couple of school board races that were close and dependent on those more than 30,000 ballots for a decision.
One of those was the Concord School Board race, where two seats were up, between Tim Koontz, Stacy McDowell and Tim A. Yoder.
Results are still preliminary and will not be certified until Nov. 15, however, the numbers show that Tim Koontz and Tim Yoder were the winners with 5,130 votes and 5,010 votes respectively. McDowell garnered 3,334 votes.
Middlebury School Board was a tight race with a mere 25 votes separating the two candidates. Michael Varner received 3,733 votes and Cindy (Stalter) Nisley received 3,708.
In Goshen Schools, there were two board races.
For District 1, Brandon Quint Miller had 1,197 votes and Jimmy Vung Srun had 441 votes.
In District 4, incumbent Keith Goodman had 1,027 votes, besting Linda Hartman who had 682 votes and Lisa Lederach who had 867 votes.
Elkhart Community Schools also had two races.
In the at-large race, Eric Ivory appears to be the winner with 10,443 votes. His opponent, Anne M. Von Der Vellen received 9,933 votes.
In the District D race, the candidate who said she dropped out of the race prior to the election, Dacey Davis, garnered 1,433 votes, besting Marvin Pace Sr.'s 1,148.
In the Baugo School Board race, which had two seats open, Chris Carithers and Todd J. Hochstetler are the apparent winners both with 2,045 votes. The third contender, Rich McPhee received 1,352 votes.
And in Wa-Nee, where two seats could be voted for, Christina Eshelman and David R. Kauffman received the most votes in Elkhart County with 2,094 and 2,891 respectively. The third candidate, Shawn Johnson receive 1,971 votes.
Because Nappanee straddles Elkhart and Kosciusko counties, the trio also received votes in Kosciusko County. Those numbers were: Eshelman, 204; Johnson, 228; and Kauffman, 338.
Those totaled up make the results: Kauffman, 3,229; Eshelman, 2,298; and Johnson, 2,199.
In the Elkhart County Council at-large race, where three people could be voted for, incumbents outpaced their contenders.
Apparent winners were Republicans Adam Bujalski, who had 38,008 votes; Thomas Stump, 38,740 votes; and Steven Clark, 37,572 votes.
The Democratic challengers received the following votes: Kevin Peters, 19769, and Ralph Spelbring, 16,145.
Rudy Yakym was declared the winner of the U.S. Representative District 2 race on election night by the Associated Press.
The Elkhart County numbers for that race were:
Yakym, a Republican, 42,732 votes; Lori Camp, Democrat, 20,065; William Henry, Libertarian, 1,274; and write-in, 29 votes.
State Representative for District 21 race was won by incumbent Timothy Wesco, a Republican. He received 11,734 votes, compared to his Libertarian opponent Melissa Kauffman's 3,324 votes.
