Oneida County Clerk Tracy Hartman knocks a stack of ballots against a table to line up all the edges.
The Board of Canvass spent Wednesday morning reviewing and counting each ballot in the District 13 race.
The race ended in a tie election night with each candidate getting 177 votes.
There were also a handful of undervotes, meaning someone turned in a ballot without voting in that specific race, and some scatterings, which is people writing some other word or phrase in write-in section.
The Board of Canvass confirmed those results last week and a coin toss was used to break the tie and select the new board member, Collette Sorgel.
After that, the other candidate running for the position, Brian Slizewski, requested a recount to confirm the results.
Oneida County Clerk Tracy Hartman decided to do that recount by hand, though she had the option to feed them through the machine again.
“In my opinion, if you’re questioning the validity of a vote count and you’re sending it back the way it’s already counted once, are you really getting a different opinion? So I wanted to make sure we did it by hand and gave the most accurate results in the end,” said Hartman.
After confirming both poll books done on election night were accurate, Hartman and the two other members of the Board of Canvass went through each ballot by hand.
Hartman read the results on the ballot and the other two each kept their own tally of the results.
Once they got through all the ballots, the three did it again switching who read the ballot. Both recounts confirmed what the machine on election night did.
“We decided we wanted to do it a second time, just to make sure that the first time we went through, we didn’t read a name wrong, have two different sets of eyes on it. The ballot totals for election night stand 177 each,” said Hartman.
With the recount over, the coin toss result stands and Collette Sorgel will be the new District 13 Supervisor for Oneida County.
In the bigger picture, Hartman hopes it shows voters that the machines are counting the votes correctly.
“Looking through everything, we see that our clerks and our poll workers really are doing they’re best job and there are very few errors discovered and none dealing with a voter being incorrectly voted, or not correctly voted. It was all just clerical little errors in the pollbooks. Hopefully it shows the voters that they really are fair elections. They are accurate,” she said.
Candidates in any of the Oneida County races had until 5:00 p.m. Wednesday to request a recount.
