County Election Officials Set To Canvass Write-In Ballots - Updated

Write-in ballots cast in last week’s election for 3rd District village board trustee will be canvassed on Thursday afternoon at the Cook County Clerk’s office.

Trustee Bob Streit leads write-in candidate Dan Sodaro by eight votes, 738-730, according to unofficial election results. Sodaro the opposition when by the end of last Tuesday night he had garnered 701 write-in votes. The unofficial tallies include early voting and absentee ballots cast in the April 5 election.

Oak Lawn resident , who charged that there were irregularities with the circulators of Sodaro’s nominating petitions, had Sodaro thrown off the ballot.

Although the village electoral board Skoundrianos’ challenge because of a typo, a sent it back for an evidentiary hearing. Sodaro said he stopped fighting the objection against his nominating petitions because he ran out of money to pay his attorney.

On Thursday, officials from Cook County Clerk David Orr’s office, which oversees elections in suburban Cook County, will review and canvass by hand electronic and paper write-in ballots cast in the 3rd District’s eight precincts. 

Ballots for county-certified write-in candidates are not counted until after election night. The county released preliminary election results on Wednesday showing Sodaro five votes behind Streit.

Sodaro’s attorney, Richard K. Means, of Oak Park, who specializes in election law, said that write-in elections are very unusual because “you don’t know what you’re going to find until you look.”

“There are very tricky technical things that might arise,” Means said. “There are hundreds of ballots and it’s not sensible to speculate what they are until you can see them and we will see them on Wednesday.”

County election officials will be looking at the paper write-in ballots, on which voters write the candidate’s name and connect a corresponding arrow to it. Paper ballots are scanned afterward by an optical scanner.

Voters also had the option of voting by touch-screen, by typing in the candidate’s name on a keyboard. Complete accuracy of the candidate’s name is not necessary, as long as election judges can determine a voter’s intent to select a specific candidate, according to the Cook County Clerk’s website.

Misspellings are not counted against the candidate, as long as election judges can determine the relationship between the appearance and sound of the name as it appears on the paper or electronic ballot.

Concerning write-in ballots where a judge has a question, election judges must agree by consensus whether to toss or keep the vote.

“It’s always possible the election judges neglected to put in all of the machine’s total votes or put in numbers twice,” Means said. “This is a way for everyone to be sure that judges counted all the ballots that were cast and combined totals correctly.”

Election judges will also be looking at the 35th precinct, where about 12 voters from the 3rd District may have erroneously voted in the 5th District village board trustee race when they were given the wrong ballots.

Tapes of “unofficial precinct results” from the 3rd District race from Sward were run at 7:35 p.m. and 7:48 p.m.

Unofficial totals from the earlier tape show Streit with 30 votes (44 percent), and “write-in” with 38 (55 percent).

The second tape run at 7:48 p.m. shows Streit with 42 votes (43 percent) and “write-in” with 54 votes (56 percent).

“(In the 35th precinct) there were two touch screens and paper ballots that get through the scanner,” Courtney Greve said, spokeswoman for the Cook County Clerk’s office. “(When election judges) finish up at the end of the night, they took the two cartridges from the touch screen and the memory pack from the scanner and put all three into a consolidation machine to consolidate all the results to print out the tape.”

Greve said that election judges at Sward School did not properly consolidate memory packs from the touch-screen machines and the paper ballots correctly on the first try.

“I have printouts that show the first touch screen had 22 votes for Streit and 20 for ‘write-in,’ and the second (touch screen) had eight votes for Streit and 18 write-ins,” Greve said.

If the losing candidate comes within 95 percent of the vote from the winning candidate, the loser can then request a "discovery recount," in which 25 percent of the precincts of the loser's choosing can be recounted. In the 3rd District race, two of the district's eight precincts can be recounted.

The canvass originally scheduled for Wednesday, has been moved to 1 p.m. Thursday.

*This article has been updated to reflect the most recent totals available on the Cook County Clerk's website.