Election judges catch voting problems in Cole County

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. (KMIZ)

Election protocols caught a voting machine malfunction after Tuesday night's election. Cole County Clerk Steve Korsmeyer said he is relieved that election judges caught the mistake just in time.

Korsmeyer said they knew that they had to recount when they noticed that the voting machine was registering 1,072 ballots when only 536 we cast at the Our Savior's Lutheran Church on South Boulevard. Ward 4, Precinct 1 was the only location that was affected by the malfunction.

Korsmeyer said "We determined that it is probably necessary to run the ballots again, so we reprogrammed our absentee machine for that precinct and we had our account watchers run those ballots through a separate machine. Then it counted accurately it came up with the right number of ballots and the right number of votes for everybody.".

The machines were pre-tested prior to the election and ran perfectly, and Korsmeyer said it's concerning to know that the machine ran fine earlier, but failed on Election Day.

Korsmeyer told ABC 17 News "We pretest all of the machines and didn't have any issue with the way it counted so it concerns me that we set it out on election day and it didn't count properly. So we are going to do our post-test Monday."