by Mary Pat Boian
Carroll County election results won’t be out until Wednesday afternoon at the earliest, according to election commissioner Bob Grudek. “It was simple inexperience,” Grudek said. “When you vote with a paper ballot, we have a machine that counts those votes, when you vote electronically, we take the chip out when the polls close and put it in the election coordinator’s computer, where votes cast must be matched with the number of voters. That’s what didn’t happen, so we locked everything up and left the courthouse around 2:30 in the morning.”
A technician for ESS, the company that manufactures the electronic voting machine had been called in, but was unable to fix the glitch, as apparently he had been trained one way and the Carroll County election coordinator another. Grudek said the expert technician from ESS would arrive from Little Rock sometime Wednesday afternoon and vote counting should be done within hours after everything is coordinated. “The data simply wasn’t organized, all the data was in the computer, we just couldn’t get it out.”
Grudek said there were some counties in Arkansas that reported they were running out of paper ballots before polls closed due to a large voter turnout. He said there was only one complaint from a voter who had to switch from paper to electronic voting.
Madison County’s unofficial results show Judge Dale Ramsey winning over attorney Chris Flanagin for the newly-created District Judge position, 230-53. Ramsey is from Madison County, Flanagin lives in Carroll County.
Statewide, Democratic presidential contender Hillary Clinton was ahead of Bernie Sanders, who never visited Arkansas, by about a 77,000 vote margin, according to the Arkansas Secretary of State. On the Republican side, Donald Trump and Ted Cruz were top dogs with Marco Rubio running third, but Trump was declared the winner with 2,349 of 2,509 precincts reporting.
Nearly 600,000 votes were cast in Arkansas, and 62 percent of primary voters selected the Republican ballot.
Carroll County results will be posted at www.esindependent.com when they come in.