PRESS RELEASE
JUNE 6, 2020
LAPORTE COUNTY ELECTION BOARD RELEASES STATEMENT BY COUNTY ELECTION VENDOR
MICROVOTE CLARIFYING WHY INTERIM TALLIES RELEASED WEDNESDAY NIGHT WERE MUCH
HIGHER THAN FINAL VOTE TALLIES RELEASED THURSDAY.
(LaPorte, IN) – LaPorte County Election Board President Andrew Voeltz today released a statement by the President of the county’s election vendor, MicroVote, seeking to answer press and public questions about why “interim results released Wednesday night were nearly double the final results issued at the conclusion of counting on Thursday.”
Voeltz noted that with the extraordinary number of absentee ballots this spring (nearly ten times the normal amount) Indiana Secretary of State Connie Lawson warned that many counties “would have delayed counts and we were among a dozen or so counties that took a couple days to do this, but we tried to release interim tallies as we went along.”
“In the Election Board’s desire to be transparent and tell what we knew at various stages, we asked the county vendor to run an interim tally on Wednesday night even though there were still precincts to be counted yet on Thursday. The Wednesday 4:30 p.m. tally run by Microvote had what Microvote’s president acknowledges today was ‘higher vote totals than subsequent reports’ due to ‘a procedural human error’ by their technician.”
“In other words, the prior night’s totals were ‘doubled up’ from the prior night leading to the inaccurate totals reported Wednesday, said Voeltz. “As Microvote’s president makes clear in his statement, when the ‘error was discovered, it was immediately and accurately corrected’ so that we have great confidence in the accuracy and reliability of final totals that were released on Thursday.
In sum, said Voeltz, “We took all the way to Thursday morning to get all tallies done because we didn’t want to rush things on Tuesday with the 5,000 plus absentee ballots to be counted. We were trying to be transparent and show progress at each stage and it’s unfortunate that the Wednesday night interim tallies caused such confusion but we are confident that having fixed the programming error, that the final day’s count is accurate and reliable.”
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