Jason Noble

jnoble2@dmreg.com

Thousands of ballots in Dallas County went uncounted on Election Day last November because of a mistake in how county officials reported their results to the Iowa Secretary of State’s Office.

Election officials at the state and county level stressed that the missing votes did not change the outcome of any election on the ballot in the suburban metro county, despite the magnitude of the error.

A total of 5,842 absentee ballots went unreported on Election Day and throughout the official certification process. That total amounts to 13 percent of the 44,430 ballots cast in the county and almost one-third of all the absentee votes cast.

“Remarkably, what they failed to report were proportional with how the rest of Dallas County voted, so it did not change one single race anywhere,” said Dawn Williams, the elections director at the Iowa Secretary of State’s Office. “It changed the results, but not who was elected.”

The discrepancy wasn’t identified until Feb. 1 — nearly three months after Election Day. The Secretary of State’s Office noticed it first, when an official found that more Dallas County voters had been identified in the statewide voter database as having voted on Nov. 8 than there were ballots cast, according to the official results.

On Feb. 2, Dallas County Elections Deputy Kim Owen wrote a letter acknowledging the mistake and describing how it happened.

After the polls closed on Nov. 8, the Dallas County Auditor’s Office fed their absentee and Election Day ballots into tabulating machines, which tallied up the votes for each race on the ballot.

For several batches of absentee ballots, however, officials failed to take a subsequent step — uploading those vote tallies to the reporting software that compiles official vote reports. That means the full results never appeared online, in media reports or in the official results reported to and certified by the Iowa Secretary of State.

How did it happen? “Human error,” according to the Dallas County letter.

Williams, the Secretary of State’s Office official, agreed.

“It does not appear that it was willful,” Williams said. “If they were going to willfully do something, they would have made it make a difference. It appears from my knowledge of this situation and my experience that it was a human error.”

A report generated by Dallas County and provided to the Des Moines Register by the Secretary of State’s Office shows the additional votes each candidate received from the newly reported ballots.

In the 5,842 new ballots, for example, Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump picked up 2,780 more votes, compared to 2,587 new votes for Democrat Hillary Clinton, meaning he added 193 votes to his previously reported 3,638-vote margin in the county. He won Iowa overall by more than 147,000 votes.

Likewise in races for U.S. Senate, Congress, the state Senate and state House, the winner according to the incomplete results picked up additional votes in the uncounted batch, increasing their margin of victory.

In only one case, in fact, did the results from the uncounted ballots run counter to the overall outcome of a race. In the contest between incumbent state Rep. Clel Baudler, R-Greenfield, and Democratic challenged Scott Heldt, the uncounted ballots netted Heldt 43 votes.

The reported results showed Baudler winning the district by more than 3,000 votes, however, rendering the 43-vote swing inconsequential.

(Also on the ballot in that November election: Dallas County Auditor Julia Helm, who ran unopposed for her first term in the office after incumbent auditor Gene Krumm retired. Helm picked up an additional 4,124 votes when the additional ballots were counted.)

As a result of the error, the Secretary of State’s Office will issue a “technical infraction” to Dallas County — essentially a strongly worded letter recommending more training for election officials. The letter won’t come with any penalties, and the county will not be subject to any criminal or civil consequences, Williams said.

The lingering question now is how to report the updated results. State law does not appear to allow county officials to amend their certified election results, leaving questions about how official documents will reflect the 5,842 additional votes.

The Secretary of State’s Office is working with the attorney general for guidance on how to proceed, Williams said.

“The incorrect numbers are in the official record, so we’re exploring what avenues there are to having full transparency and getting the corrected numbers on the official record,” she said.