Tuscaloosa County Probate Judge Rob Robertson admitted Wednesday night that the absentee ballot box was not balancing out. According to WVUA 23, Robertson said ballots were recounted Wednesday and still didn’t balance. Late Thursday the error was discovered: the ballots hadn’t gone missing. They had never been counted in the first place. The ballots weren’t counted due to an error with the ballot machine used for the first two counts, according to WBRC.com.
It started with a problem with voting machines. Almost 13,000 envelopes with absentee ballots were turned in by Tuesday, but they could not be counted on Election Day because they kept jamming in machines. On Wednesday, officials started recounting the votes and discovered around 800 ballots missing.
Williams Parks, an executive board member of the Tuscaloosa County Democratic Party, stated, “Right now, there’s about 800 ballots missing. Everyone is doing everything they can to find these ballots. But 800 ballots missing is a significant problem for 800 voters who aren’t going to have their voices heard.”
Tuscaloosa County Circuit Clerk Magaria Bobo oversees absentee voting and was confident that the missing ballots have nothing to do with voter suppression.
“I mean, it’s not even related. I handle the absentee voting. The counting is done by absentee poll workers. It’s not even related, as far as the allegations made about the long lines, that I was suppressing votes. That’s totally not true. There’s just so many people trying to vote at the same time,” Bobo told WBRC. “I’ve been here as they counted the envelopes they arrived in. Then you can count the number of ballots if they line up. Right now, they don’t,” Parks continued.
Now that all ballots have been accounted for, Bobo released a statement. “We have double hand counted the ballots and the number is what it was supposed to be according to the number of voted ballots turned back in. We have no ballots unaccounted for. It has been determined there was a mechanical issue with the machine that was used for the first two counts. The ballots will be hand fed into different machines beginning at 9:00 a.m. on Friday, November 6, 2020 to complete the count.
No absentee votes were included in Tuesday’s election results, and officials didn’t believe the missing ballots would have changed any local election outcomes.
