A recount in Utah’s 2nd Congressional District Republican primary, which Rep. Celeste Maloy led by a whisker, shaved 38 votes off her margin of victory over challenger Colby Jenkins, but did not change the overall outcome.
After the election was certified late last month, results showed Maloy had beaten Jenkins by 214 votes, but because it was within 0.25 percentage points, Jenkins was entitled to request a recount, including a review of all of the ballots that had been disqualified.
After the recount, which concluded Monday, Maloy’s advantage was cut to 176 votes out of more than 107,000 ballots cast in the district.
In the process of doing the recount, state elections officials said they found a problem in the software Tooele and Washington counties were using to manually enter the results of ballots that needed to be adjudicated — or reviewed by election judges to determine how the voter intended to vote.
Clerks in Tooele and Washington counties developed a workaround for the issue, but the error prompted state officials to suspend the use of the Election Systems & Software’s Electionware program and direct counties that use the software to double-check their results to make sure they were accurate.
The software issue led to 55 ballots in Tooele County and 36 in Washington County that had not been counted initially to be added to the totals, leading to a gain of 35 votes for Jenkins — accounting for nearly the entire discrepancy between the totals certified last month and the post-recount tally.
“Upon inspection of the election database, it was confirmed that the adjudicated ballots were correctly counted and recorded; however, had not successfully saved to the reporting module,” the company said in a statement. “The issue was corrected by identifying the adjudicated ballots that did not save properly, clearing out those ballots, and re-loading them in smaller batches, resulting in accurate and reliable results.”
Election Systems & Software added that it was working with the state and county clerks to audit the databases that were part of the recount.
“The county clerks and their staffs have done amazing work to count and recount the ballots,” Maloy said in a statement Monday. “Their process has been thorough, transparent and their remarkable accuracy should inspire confidence in our election system.”
Likewise, Jenkins said he was “thankful for the tireless efforts of the clerks and their staff in conducting the recount.”
“In every step of this process, we have advanced bit-by-bit and the votes we’ve gained in this recount are one more example of that,” he said.
Jenkins has filed a lawsuit with the Utah Supreme Court challenging the election results, arguing that nearly 1,200 ballots cast in southwestern Utah should be counted. The ballots were postmarked after the deadline because, Jenkins argues, they had to be transported to Las Vegas to be marked. The delays allegedly led to them being postmarked after the deadline.
“What was a race that was too-close-to-call is now even closer,” he said after the recount Monday. “We eagerly await a decision from the Utah Supreme Court to ensure that every legal vote is counted, and every voice is heard.”
Maloy said she is “eager to get a decision from the courts,” as well.
Last month, a federal judge rejected Jenkins’ argument that failing to count the late-postmarked ballots violated the equal protection clause of the Constitution. Voters, the judge said, need to be responsible for getting their ballots mailed in time.
A state judge had also rejected Jenkins’ request that his campaign be given lists of ballots in Washington County that were rejected because of mismatched signatures. The campaign wanted to contact those voters while they could still “cure” the errors. A judge said the county clerk has discretion as to whether to release the lists.
Gubernatorial candidate Phil Lyman has also challenged the election results, asking the Utah Supreme Court to overturn the primary results, throw Gov. Spencer Cox and Lt. Gov. Deidre Henderson out of office and declare Lyman — who beat Cox at the state GOP convention — as the Republican nominee.